INSIGHTS FROM THE EDGE

Writing

Long-form notes on AI systems, engineering leadership, design systems, and building in public — written the way I think aloud, not the way a press release sounds.

GO JUN 26, 2026 • 14 min

GOMAXPROCS, CPU Limits, and the Kubernetes Trap That Silently Kills Go Throughput

If your Go pod has less than one full core, the runtime treats it as single-threaded for parallelism. For years the Go scheduler didn't know about Kubernetes CPU limits and over-scheduled anyway. Here's what changed in Go 1.25, why giving a pod 'extra' CPU sometimes dramatically improves throughput, and how to get it right in 2026.

Jamal Yusuf Read →
COGNITIVE AI JUN 24, 2026 • 15 min

Expert Vision: Cognitive Foundations for Human-AI Collaboration

What fifteen years of studying how experts perceive, decide, and perform under pressure — from eye-tracking systems to competitive gaming to enterprise AI platforms — teaches us about building agents that genuinely extend expertise rather than merely automate tasks.

Jamal Yusuf Read →
PRODUCTION AI JUN 22, 2026 • 16 min

Reliability Engineering for Generative AI Platforms

Fifteen years of distributed systems, real-time pipelines, and incident command applied to LLM platforms. How to build agentic systems that degrade gracefully, contain failures, and remain auditable when everything is on fire at 2 a.m.

Jamal Yusuf Read →
AI ENGINEERING JUN 20, 2026 • 17 min

Context Engineering for Production Agentic Systems

Beyond prompt engineering lies context engineering — the systematic design of memory, state, retrieval contracts, and compression layers that turn brittle LLM workflows into reliable, observable, enterprise-grade agentic platforms.

Jamal Yusuf Read →
BUILDING IN PUBLIC JUN 18, 2026 • 16 min

What My Side Projects Are Really About

ChillStep Radio, quantum chaos, synesthetic pianos, and a robots.txt for AI — the side projects I build when enterprise platforms go quiet and curiosity takes the wheel.

Jamal Yusuf Read →
ENGINEERING JUN 17, 2026 • 14 min

The Boring Go Layer Between Your RAG Demo and Production

RAG demos live in notebooks. Production RAG lives in ingestion pipelines — and I keep choosing Go for the unglamorous middle.

Jamal Yusuf Read →