Writing

Thoughts

Notes on applying AI agents to real business processes, including decision models, determinism and auditable workflows.

  1. Title card reading 'Harness engineering for a fleet', with the line 'Codex builds, Claude coordinates, pi attacks' beneath it.

    7 min read

    Harness engineering for a fleet: how I run Claude, Codex and pi across a dozen repos

    A harness is everything around the model: the instructions it reads, the tools it may call, the memory that survives a context reset, the checks that decide whether a run passed, and the gates that stop it doing what the rules forbid. On a normal day here there are ten to fifteen agent panes open across six or seven repos, three providers and several accounts. This is the setup as it stands on 24 October 2026, and every rule in it has a receipt.

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  2. The home view of the AI Basics interactive primer: the headline 'AI Basics, but you get to break it.', a short introduction, two buttons, and the first row of concept cards under the heading Understanding the Brain.

    1 min read

    AI Basics: An Interactive Primer

    A single interactive page that explains how AI systems work and how they are put to use. Each of eleven ideas, from language models and tokens to agents and guardrails, comes with a small demonstration you can operate yourself. The primer opens in any browser and runs offline once it has been downloaded.

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  3. Diagram of three components and their roles: Jev, a typed decision model, answers narrow judgement questions; The Decision Model's rule families apply the business rules deterministically; the LLM agent calls only the tools the conclusion permits.

    6 min read

    Applying The Decision Model to long-running agent workflows

    Large language models do not apply the same rule in the same way on every run, and in long-running agent workflows the inconsistency compounds. The approach described here removes business decisions from the prompt and models them with The Decision Model (TDM), a method published by Barbara von Halle and Larry Goldberg in 2009. Rule families apply the business rules in code, a typed decision model answers only the narrow questions that need judgement and abstains when uncertain, and the LLM acts only within the conclusion.

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