(2)What I do
Five kinds of work I keep coming back to. Most things I've built are one of these, or two of them stitched together.
I build agents that do things inside real systems: triage a ticket, reconcile a record, draft and send, and escalate to a person when they are unsure. The interesting part is not the model. It is deciding what the agent is allowed to do, and making sure it knows when to stop.
So the limits live in code. An allow-list decides which actions exist at all, because a prompt that promises to behave is not a control. And when the agent hands a case to a person, I count that as the system working, not failing.
I test against an eval set built from real conversations rather than ones I made up, and I keep traces I can actually read at 2am, when something has gone wrong and I need to know why.
Slowly at first, then all at once.
Listen
I start by understanding the workflow and the people in it. What happens today, where it hurts, what 'working' would actually look like. Usually one honest conversation is enough to know whether it is worth building.
Sketch
Architecture on one page, interface sketches on another, and an evaluation plan before any prompt is written. Every decision gets a line about its tradeoff so we can revisit it later without arguing from memory.
Build
Short iterations, working software from the first week, evals running on every change. Progress shows up in a staging environment, not a slide deck.
Keep tuning
Launch with monitoring, cost tracking and a feedback loop, then improve on real usage. The first version is never the last, and I would rather be around for the second.
Things I'm always happy to do.
- 01Give a talk or run a workshop on building agents that can be wrong safely.
- 02Mentor someone who is just starting out in AI engineering.
- 03Review your agent or retrieval setup and tell you honestly what I'd change.
- 04Collaborate with designers who want their AI product to feel considered.
Want to talk? Say hello.
A project, a question, or just to compare notes. I read everything and write back within a couple of days.