My thoughts, on paper.
Yesterday's post ended with an agent that answers questions. As of last night it transacts. An agent that discovers ai.jakegaylor.com can ask for my availability, get live slots from my real calendar, and book a thirty-minute intro call. The booking lands as pending, I approve or decline it, and the booker gets the outcome by email. The protocol has two halves, and the split is the design. Asking…
The Agent2Agent protocol hit 1.0 under the Linux Foundation back in March, and the official JS SDK's stable 1.0 landed this month. As of this week, ai.jakegaylor.com implements it. One unauthenticated GET to /.well-known/agent-card.json returns a card describing an agent that represents me, and a JSON-RPC endpoint behind it will answer questions about my experience, explain how to connect to my…
A new kind of computer showed up over the last couple of years, and we're calling the primitive an agent sandbox. It suspends when idle, wakes on demand, keeps its state, and answers to its own name. Fly sells them as Sprites, Vercel as Vercel Sandbox, AWS as Lambda MicroVMs, and Daytona built its whole product around them. This is a new class of software to operate, and the operational discipline…
Every tool makes some moves cheap and others expensive, and you end up solving problems out of the cheap column. If deploys are scary you batch changes. If provisioning a database takes a ticket and a week, the new feature gets crammed into the schema you already have. Nobody chooses any of that in a meeting, the tool chooses it, and the team learns to call the result engineering judgment. None of…
AI agents work in my repos and my home cloud every day. They write manifests, onboard apps, and diagnose failures. The models have been good enough for that work for a while. The wins are in enablement, arranging the environment so more of the work is safe to hand to an agent. A big one was moving my secrets behind names. Every secret in my cluster lives in Infisical and has a stable address, the…
AI agents are joining engineering teams as contributors and operators. Most of the conversation is about which AI tools to adopt, and I think that's the wrong end of the problem. The better question is whether your system has the properties that make delegation safe in the first place. I run agents against my home cloud every day. They write manifests, onboard apps, diagnose failures, and propose…
My homelab is a k3s cluster spread across a few Mac minis. Linux VMs via Lima, Tailscale for the network, and Flux reconciling everything from a git repo. I gave the full tour of that architecture over on the homelab page . This post is about the secrets side, because every credential in that cluster now flows through Infisical, and it ended up in way more places than I expected. Just as…
For a long time I used SOPS, and for a long time SOPS was the right call. If you weren't in a major cloud, the story for dealing with secrets sucked. AWS and GCP folks got a managed secrets service with IAM bolted on. The rest of us got three options. You could wire a password manager CLI into your deploy scripts and hope everyone on the project had the same setup. You could bite the bullet and…
Developers are used to pulling down and executing strange code on their workstations. I'm not saying it's great but npx / uvx are so popular because they allow you to execute named code from the web. Heck, even the installation instructions for uv boil down to curl | bash , or "run some code from the web". However, businesses are not used to running untrusted code in their cloud environment. Most…
This post is for all of us engineers trying to start product businesses. If you're doing a project for fun this might offend your sensibilities. If you're a VC backed business person with a McKinsey study this might not be the place for you 😂. From the perspective of a fledgling business creating a new product, nothing matters more than users. Not even the product. You absolutely must get your…
Claude is awesome. He helps me get a lot done. But sometimes I get a little tired of hearing him say the same stuff. Inspired by a couple of different streamers and a late night with too much (or too little?) caffiene, I present you with THE CHAOS APE. Unlocking Chaos Mode Unlocking chaos mode involves telling the LLM to enter chaos mode injecting personality establishing the LLM with a role in an…
In this series we are going to focus on questions that I regularly hear from interviewers. In most panel interviews we are trying to cover a lot of ground quickly and so these questions don't get the attention they deserve. Servers vs Serverless This isn't quite the dichotomy it used to be. A whole spectrum of offerings are available now with managed autoscaling groups, tools like knative, and the…
As a long time programmer, I have written hello world countless times. And I still do it. I am doing it now. "Hello World" allows me to focus on the specific goal of getting text on the screen but along the way I end up with the groundwork laid for the next steps of building whatever it is I have in mind. This blog post is that in a lot of ways. Why am I writing at all? I have been building…