Where Retrieval Stops Being Enough for Agent Memory
Similarity search fails agent memory in two specific ways. Here's how Cascade fixes both, including the RRF fusion code and why recency is a retrieval channel instead of a filter.
airagretrieval
Blog
Writing on software, open source, and engineering.
Cascade Today: An All-in-One Layer for Claude Code
Routing, retrieval, and memory around a coding agent. The tier system that picks the cheapest capable model, why the RAG index degrades gracefully, and what a month of building it settled.
cascadeairust
Curtain: Closing macOS Screen Sharing's One Privacy Gap in an Afternoon
macOS Screen Sharing leaves one real privacy gap. The fix turns on filtering input by event source, which lets you block the desk without blocking yourself. Ninety minutes to a working version.
curtainmacosswift
Starting Cascade: Early Lessons Extending Claude Code
Cascade began as scripts to paper over my own problems with Claude Code. Four lessons from the first month, including why multi-account routing is a bookkeeping problem and why the daemon changed the whole design.
cascadeaiclaude-code
From ML Experiments to Production AI: My Journey
Two decades of systems engineering, then AI. The gap between a working notebook and a running service never closed, it moved. And the skills that close it are not machine learning skills.
aimlproduction
Core and Plugins: Drawing nSelf's Extension Boundary
Splitting a monolithic CLI into a core plus 60 plugins. Schema ownership in a shared Postgres, a declared capability model, and what has to be true before a plugin economy can exist at all.
nselfgoarchitecture
Building a Self-Hosted Backend: The nSelf Journey
It started as a 200-line deploy script and became a 248-command Go CLI. What actually made self-hosting viable was not the containers, it was backup drills, health gates, and refusing to have a broken middle state.
nselfgoself-hosted
Converting NREL's Solar Position Algorithm to JavaScript: A Journey in Precision
Porting a reference C algorithm to JS accurate to ±0.0003°. The catastrophic cancellation hiding in the Julian Century, why the naive port was 50x slower, and what actually closed the gap.
javascripttypescriptnumerics
React at Scale: Lessons from Enterprise Applications
Enterprise React for Apple, Capgemini, and Northrop Grumman. The 2.8MB bundle we cut to 400KB, why it got that way structurally, and the state management rule that actually holds up.
reacttypescriptperformance
The Evolution of PHP: From Personal Home Pages to Modern Enterprise
Fifteen years shipping PHP, including the PHP 7 migration. What the Zend Engine rewrite actually did to get 2x throughput at half the memory, and what maintaining backward compatibility at that scale costs.
phpperformancemigration
Why Node.js Changed Everything for Full-Stack Developers
I moved my primary stack from PHP to Node in 2014, before that was a safe call. What the event loop actually changes about system design, and the failure mode nobody warns you about.
nodejsjavascriptarchitecture