INSIGHTS FROM THE EDGE

Writing

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

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.

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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.

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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.

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ENGINEERING JUN 14, 2026 • 13 min

Validating Agent Outputs in Go Before They Touch Production

Structured outputs, schema validation, and the boring Go layer that keeps probabilistic agents from becoming probabilistic incidents.

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ENGINEERING JUN 10, 2026 • 12 min

Context Is the Kill Switch: Go, Cancellation, and LLM Timeouts

Why context.Context is the most underrated tool in production LLM orchestration — and what happens when you forget the kill switch.

Jamal Yusuf Read →