Writing

Notes from the work.

Written when we learn something worth writing down, not on a content calendar. Mostly the parts of a build that went differently than expected.

LatestAug 18, 20265 min read

Give an Agent Tools, Not Credentials

An agent inherits every permission you hand it. Scope the tool, not the key, and design for the day the model is talked into calling something it should not.

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AI EngineeringAug 17, 20264 min

Do You Actually Need a Vector Database?

For most retrieval workloads Postgres with pgvector is enough and much cheaper to operate. The thresholds where that stops being true are specific ones.

AI EngineeringAug 15, 20264 min

Getting Reliable JSON Out of a Language Model

Constrained decoding fixes syntax, not meaning. The failures that survive are valid documents with invented enum values and fields quietly left empty.

Engineering StrategyAug 14, 20264 min

Error Budgets Only Work If Something Stops

An SLO with no consequence is a dashboard. What makes error budgets change engineering behaviour is a pre-agreed rule about what happens when one is spent.

Engineering StrategyAug 13, 20264 min

A Platform Team Is Not a Ticket Queue

Internal platforms fail when they become a gate rather than a shortcut. The test is whether product teams choose the paved road when they could go around it.

SecurityAug 12, 20264 min

You Now Have a Model Supply Chain

Package provenance is a solved discipline. Model weights, datasets and prompts arrive with far less scrutiny and the same power to change behaviour.

Financial ServicesAug 11, 20265 min

Card Fraud Models: Optimising for the Right Error

Extreme class imbalance, a false positive that costs a customer, and adversaries who adapt. Why accuracy is the wrong metric and what to use instead.

ModernizationAug 7, 202610 min

Replacing a Legacy System Without a Big-Bang Cutover

Large rewrites fail at a rate that should have ended the practice. The alternative is slower to start and much harder to get catastrophically wrong.

Engineering StrategyJul 27, 20264 min

What Custom Software Actually Costs to Build in Dubai

Rates are the number everyone compares and the one that predicts least. Scope, integration surface and data residency move budgets far more than day rates do.

Financial ServicesJul 21, 20265 min

Fintech Security: Where the Losses Actually Come From

Account takeover, API abuse, insider access and third-party breach account for most fintech loss. Where controls belong when the product is money.

AI EngineeringJul 17, 20265 min

Integrating an AI API Without Building a Liability

Rate limits, cost per call, non-determinism and vendor lock-in are the practical problems. What to put between your application and the model.

HealthcareJul 16, 20264 min

What Drives the Cost of a Healthcare Application

Integration surface, compliance evidence and clinical validation explain most of the gap between a healthcare app and an ordinary one. Where money goes.

TelecomJul 3, 20265 min

Telecom Fraud: High Volume, Thin Margins, Fast Losses

Interconnect bypass, subscription fraud, wangiri and account takeover each need different detection. Why reconciliation catches more than models do.

Financial ServicesJun 30, 20265 min

What Makes Digital Wallet Development Harder Than It Looks

The wallet UI is a weekend. Reconciliation, disputes, the rules on holding customer funds, and top-ups whose callback never arrives are the project.

ModernizationJun 29, 20264 min

Proving the Data Arrived: Integrity in Cloud Migrations

Row counts matching is not proof. The failures that survive a migration are quiet: silent truncation, timezone drift and precision loss nobody reconciles.

Financial ServicesJun 24, 20265 min

Robo-Advisor Development: The Parts That Are Not the Algorithm

Portfolio construction is the documented part. Suitability, rebalancing under tax constraints, custody and proving a recommendation are the real work.

AI EngineeringJun 19, 202611 min

What Retrieval-Augmented Generation Actually Costs in Production

The demo runs on a laptop. Production has an embedding bill, a re-ranking latency budget and a quality problem nobody measured. Where the money goes.

Financial ServicesJun 8, 20264 min

Building Fraud Detection: Decisions Before Models

Where the decision point sits, what latency you can afford, how labels arrive and who reviews an alert decide the system. The model comes after.

Engineering StrategyJun 5, 20265 min

Why Website Quotes Differ by 10x for the Same Brief

The same requirements return wildly different quotes because the brief is underspecified in four predictable places. What to pin down beforehand.

HealthcareJun 1, 20264 min

HIPAA for Engineers: What the Rule Requires of the System You Build

HIPAA is not a certificate you obtain. It is a set of obligations about protected health information that show up as concrete architectural constraints.

Engineering StrategyMay 25, 20265 min

What Changed About Outsourcing, and What Did Not

Distributed work is normal and cost arbitrage has narrowed. What still decides whether an engagement works is context transfer, which has not changed.

Engineering StrategyMay 19, 20264 min

API Design Decisions You Cannot Undo Later

Versioning, pagination, error semantics and identifier choices are cheap to fix at the start and expensive later. Which decisions are truly irreversible.

HealthcareMay 18, 20265 min

Hospital Inventory: Why Consumption Data Is Always Wrong

Par levels, expiry, consignment stock and the gap between what was scanned and what was used. Why these systems drift, and what reduces the drift.

SecurityMay 11, 20264 min

Zero Trust Without the Product Catalogue

Zero trust is an architectural position, not a product. What it requires, where machine learning genuinely helps, and the sequence that avoids stalling.

Engineering StrategyMay 6, 20265 min

Delivery Automation: Optimise the Wait, Not the Build

Most delivery delay is queueing, not compute. Why build-time optimisation disappoints, and which four measures tell you where the time actually goes.

AI EngineeringApr 29, 20264 min

Adaptive Interfaces: Personalization That Does Not Make Software Unpredictable

Interfaces that rearrange themselves break the spatial memory people rely on. Where adaptation helps, where it costs, and how to keep the product learnable.

Engineering StrategyApr 24, 20264 min

Replacing SaaS With Something You Build: When the Maths Works

Falling build costs make replacing a subscription look obvious. The comparison usually omits integrations, compliance and the maintenance you quietly inherit.

MobilityApr 15, 20265 min

Grid Constraints Decide Where EV Charging Can Actually Go

Charger rollout is limited by available grid capacity far more than by hardware cost. What load management and flexibility agreements can change.

AI EngineeringApr 13, 20265 min

Getting Generative AI Past the Pilot

Most enterprise GenAI pilots work and never ship. The blockers are rarely model quality — they are evaluation, data access, ownership and unit economics.

AI EngineeringApr 3, 20264 min

Enterprise NLP: Which Problems Are Actually Solved

Classification and extraction are reliable enough to build on. Summarisation needs an evaluation story before it needs a model. A practical division.

AI EngineeringMar 27, 20264 min

Building Contract Review Tooling Lawyers Will Actually Use

Extraction accuracy is the easy half. Adoption turns on whether a reviewer can verify a finding in seconds and see clearly what the system did not look at.

Engineering StrategyMar 25, 20264 min

AI-Assisted Development: What Actually Changes in the Delivery Pipeline

Writing code was never the constraint. When generation gets cheap, the bottleneck moves to review, and most teams have not resourced for that shift.

Engineering StrategyMar 20, 20264 min

AI in Software Testing: Useful for Everything Except the Hard Part

Generation, triage and coverage analysis are real wins. Deciding what correct means is not, and generated tests happily encode the bug you already shipped.

HealthcareMar 11, 20265 min

Telemedicine: The Requirements That Are Not About Video

Video calling is a solved commodity. Licensing boundaries, clinical documentation, prescribing rules and triage safety are the difficult parts.

Engineering StrategyMar 9, 20269 min

Build Versus Buy: A Decision Framework That Survives Contact With Reality

Build or buy is usually argued on the wrong axis. The useful question is which parts of the problem are genuinely yours, and what integration will cost.

Financial ServicesMar 6, 20264 min

Fintech Build Decisions That Are Hard to Reverse

Licensing route, ledger design, KYC provider and reconciliation model are settled early and change expensively. What each one commits you to.

SecurityMar 2, 20264 min

The Attacks That Actually Get In

Breach reports keep describing the same routes: stolen credentials, unpatched edge devices, third parties, misconfiguration. Where budget belongs.

Engineering StrategyFeb 23, 20264 min

What Belongs in a Mobile MVP, and What Cannot Be Deferred

Cutting scope is the point of an MVP, but app stores, updates and permissions make some decisions irreversible. Which corners are safe to cut.

AI EngineeringFeb 17, 20264 min

Choosing a Cloud for AI Workloads: The Comparison That Actually Matters

Feature matrices go stale in a quarter. The durable questions are data gravity, egress economics and which layer of your stack you are willing to couple.

EducationFeb 16, 20264 min

Cross-Platform in Education: What Actually Constrains the Choice

Device estates, offline requirements and accessibility obligations narrow the options more than framework capability does. Choosing for education.

AI EngineeringFeb 5, 20264 min

Recommender Systems: The Cold Start Never Ends

New users and items arrive continuously, so cold start is permanent. Plus why offline metrics mislead and what feedback loops do to a catalogue.

AI EngineeringFeb 2, 20264 min

Multi-Agent Systems: What Breaks When You Add the Second Agent

Splitting a task across cooperating agents multiplies failure surface, cost and debugging difficulty. When that trade is worth making, and when one call wins.

MobilityJan 21, 20264 min

Fuel Telemetry: Getting Data That Is Worth Acting On

Fuel data arrives from sensors of varying honesty, records nobody reconciles and vehicles that idle for hours. Making it good enough to decide on.

ModernizationJan 19, 20264 min

Using AI Agents on Legacy Code: Where It Helps and Where It Lies

Agents are genuinely good at reading unfamiliar code and terrible at knowing which behaviour was deliberate. That asymmetry should shape how you use them.

Financial ServicesJan 13, 20265 min

AI in Banking: Where It Is Allowed to Decide

The constraint is not model quality. Explainability, fair-lending exposure and the rules on automated decisions determine what AI can be trusted with.

MobilityJan 12, 20265 min

EV Charging Software: Why the Hard Part Is Offline Chargers

OCPP, roaming, tariffs and settlement are manageable. The design problem is a charger on a flaky connection that must still meter and bill correctly.

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