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Casey West

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Compute Scarcity Is Permanent. Build a Ladder.

Every resilience pattern you know assumes the machine shows up. Accelerator scarcity breaks that assumption, and the pattern catalogs have not caught up. Here is the Compute Fallback Ladder—an ordered set of rungs your workload can run on, a selector that picks the highest obtainable one, and a promotion path back up when capacity returns.

Your Agents Aren't Too Insecure. They're Too Awake.

Agent density is a lifecycle problem, not an isolation problem. Google's own GKE Agent Sandbox benchmark puts the sandbox at 44% and suspend and resume at up to 3.5x—the sandbox is the smaller half. And upstream Kubernetes 1.37 is quietly turning checkpoint and restore into a kubelet primitive. Here's why the economics live in the lifecycle, not the box.

Schedule the Accelerators: A GPU/TPU Puzzle

I'm hiring a Senior Developer Relations Engineer for GKE and AI Infrastructure. Instead of describing the work, I built it: a small, playable cluster scheduler that teaches the real problem behind running AI at scale—gang scheduling, memory ceilings, spot preemption, and a TPU slice with actual topology.

Governed Growth, Part 4: Multi-Model, Governed, and Boring

The finale of the series: the mature end-state the first three parts build toward. When every server-side capability's trust boundary is a decision on record—the deployment tier you chose, the toggle you set, the contract you signed—saying yes to another team stops being a risk assessment and becomes a lookup. Fine-grained capability governance is what buys you safe expansion. Maturity, not…

Governed Growth, Part 3: Default-Deny for Model Capabilities

Parts 1 and 2 argued that a capability's trust boundary is a separate decision from the model's. Part 3 is the runbook that makes the decision stick: the org-policy constraints that gate partner web search and structured outputs, set once at the organization tier by gcloud and Terraform, plus the seams org-policy doesn't reach—VPC Service Controls, request-response logging, the grounding-provider…

Governed Growth, Part 2: The Retention Window That Quietly Shrank

On February 23, 2026, Google quietly made the retention terms for Grounding with Google Search better: the window dropped from thirty days to up to three, and what's kept narrowed from your prompts and output to short-lived debug logs. The old thirty-day, prompts-and-output language didn't vanish—it now describes Grounding with Google Maps, a sibling capability under the same terms. Here's what…

Building gemini-search-mcp: Grounding, Citations, and Choosing a Gemini Model

The builder's companion to Governed Growth—the same reference repo from the implementer's chair. Why I built a one-tool MCP server to hand an assistant a reliable, governed Google search, how Gemini grounding and citation extraction work in the code, and how a full, human-validated eval picked the default model. The surprise: gemini-3.1-flash-lite matched the larger models on quality, grounded…

Governed Growth, Part 1: Better Together, Governed Apart

Opening a platform to more teams and more models—first-party and partner, such as Gemini and Claude—quietly assumes those capabilities share one trust boundary. They don't. Multi-model expansion is a governance-maturity story: Google Cloud lets you grant capability broadly while keeping each model's data path a deliberate, fine-grained decision. You can grow usage without growing exposure.

GitHub Gives You Two Rate Limits. You're Only Using One.

GitHub's REST and GraphQL APIs have separate hourly rate limits—two budgets, not one. Most automation hammers a single bucket while the other sits full. Here's how to see both, why agents drain GraphQL fast, and how routing work across both effectively doubles your headroom.

The Agentic Manifesto: Engineering in the Era of Autonomy

Traditional SDLC fails for autonomous AI. The Agentic Manifesto introduces the Agentic Delivery Lifecycle (ADLC)—a new operating model for engineering, governing, and tuning non-deterministic systems at scale.

Building Scalable AI Agents: A Deep Dive into Decoupled Tools with ADK, MCP, and Cloud Run

A deep-dive playbook for building scalable, enterprise-grade AI agents. Learn how to move beyond monolithic designs by decoupling tools with a powerful microservices architecture using ADK, the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and Google Cloud Run.

Unlock Elite Agents: The Art of Evolving LLM Prompts into System Masterpieces

Explore the evolution from basic LLM interactions to crafting sophisticated System Instructions, and discover how meta-prompting—using AI to refine AI prompts—can unlock more powerful and collaborative AI agents. This post details the journey and a practical approach to building AI that helps you build better AI.

Taming the Python Hydra: A Modern Dev Environment with uv

Stop wrestling with Python versions and dependencies. Learn how to build a fast, simple, and unified development environment using uv

AI-Driven Development: Modernizing a Decade-Old Website in 3 Days

A case study on migrating a decade-old Jekyll website to Astro in just 3 days by partnering with AI (Google Gemini) for planning, coding, and building custom development tools.

Redefining Culture Fit

Moving beyond superficial 'culture fit' towards shared values for building truly inclusive and effective teams.

Durable Communication

It's not inherently harder to be a tech lead while remote or on a distributed team – it's more deliberate.

The Help Timer

Wait an hour to ask for help. No more, no less.

A Call for More Tech Leadership

Tech leadership is a critical discipline we need to cultivate.

Integrated Tests Are a Scam

The point of test driven development is not to do testing; it's to learn about the quality of our design.

Your Software Is Made of People

The delivery of meaningful value to customers requires the actions of both people and technical objects. One can’t improve without the other.

There's Still No Silver Bullet (2006)

A contemporary look on Brooks' essay No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering