07 Jul 2026
· ai-engineering
I am a self-taught1 full-stack developer for everything my company ships. For many years I have run a micro incubator — a handful of products and services that I build, deploy and own, all by myself. I write the code, the tests, and the deployment scripts; I run the servers. And I was quite content with that job description.
Then one of those products grew into a problem I could not keep up with.
Continue reading →07 Jul 2026
· ai-engineering
This is Part 2 of a three-part series. Part 1 tells the story of why this system exists. Part 3 collects the rules I now follow. This part is the engineering.
PublishersGlobal runs a verification pipeline over an active directory of ~20,000 publishers and service providers. Every profile needs to be continuously verified and re-verified, because data on the internet degrades very quickly. In the first few months we ran close to 30,000 verification passes. This post recounts some of what I learned building and running the verification system on open-weight models.
Continue reading →07 Jul 2026
· ai-engineering
This is Part 3 of a three-part series. Part 1 is the story of why the system exists; Part 2 is the engineering detail. This part is the distillation: the rules I now follow, each one paid for by a specific mistake1. I’d bet that this list is far from complete and I will have the opportunity to add to it.
I came to AI engineering with decades of full-stack habits. Some transferred directly, some had to be unlearned, and a few new ones had to be acquired at the cost of production incidents. Here are twelve, in roughly the order the pipeline taught them to me.
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