Writing
Production forensics and engineering notes from building and shipping AI products.
Surviving a Model Deprecation Without Blowing Up the Budget
When our primary model got deprecated, the obvious upgrade would have wrecked our margins. So I treated it as an engineering problem, not a bill to pay.
Designing for Distrust: Why AI Adoption Requires Verifiability Over Speed
Generating a fast answer is easy. Giving non-technical users the tools to verify that answer even faster than they could without AI is the real breakthrough for adoption.
Same payload, two backends: Vertex cached nothing, Studio cached every turn
My Gemini cache hit count was zero on my own setup, while the same prompt caches every turn on a sibling backend. The forensic, the paired test that proves it's the backend, and the fix.