Blog

AI

Claude Code, the Agent SDK and other agent frameworks, and agent workflows doing real business work.

  1. An AI assistant needs one door into your data, not a key to every SaaS appSteward gives Claude a single read-only tool over the curated warehouse, with field-level authorization compiled to Cedar. Here is why I built it that way instead of wiring up one connector per product.AI6 min
  2. I deleted five AI review agents and the reviews got betterA five-specialist review fan-out looked thorough. One session cost $5.88 and 905 seconds for zero findings, and that's what actually changed the design.AI4 min
  3. A green test suite is not proof a non-programmer's edit was safeA change-tier system and a verifier that fails risky edits even when every test passes, because a green suite is not evidence the change was safe.AI5 min
  4. Don't trust a model's arithmetic, only its tool callsWhy I moved every numeric answer out of model prose and into a calculator tool call, and what a data-quality investigation taught me about trusting the output.AI5 min
  5. Field-level authorization for AI agents, enforced in-processRow-level access control tells an agent nothing exists. Section-level tells it the entity exists with fewer fields, and that difference changes what an agent can safely ask.AI4 min
  6. Forcing the model to do arithmetic in PythonAn LLM cannot be trusted to self-report whether it actually did math, so a Stop hook checks mechanically whether a real calculation tool ran first.AI4 min
  7. The judge that never firesA quality check the model can choose to invoke isn't weak enforcement. It's no enforcement, and the corpus behind it has a measured number to prove it.AI4 min
  8. A hand-rolled agent loop that works is not a reason to keep itWhen a vendor SDK actively maintains the parts of an agent loop you built by hand, the build-vs-adopt math changes even if your version already works.AI4 min
  9. The prompt-cache floor that made the cheap model expensiveA two-tier triage pipeline assumed its cheap model's shared prompt was cached. Real token telemetry showed it never once was.AI4 min
  10. What a bot vote is allowed to decideThe architecture decision trail behind letting an AI code-review job cast a real merge approval, and the explicit line we drew around what that vote can never do alone.AI5 min
  11. Delegating to agents without losing the threadFanning work out to parallel agents is easy. Staying responsible for the result is the part that needs a method.AI4 min
  12. Hosting a Claude Code marketplace on your own domainIt works, but three undocumented-feeling constraints will bite you. Here they are before they do.AI3 min