Designing Speech Transcription for Context, Not Just Latency
Why full audio transcription outperforms streaming transcription, and how encoder-decoder models, cross-attention, and faster inference shape product tradeoffs.
Johnson's Thoughts
Johnson Shi's thoughts on technology, markets, and the systems shaping our future.
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DR-DCI: Fast Corpus Retrieval as a Harness Engineering Differentiator for Inference Providers
DR-DCI is an optimization built on top of RAG for letting agents run precise, verifiable search across large document collections without scanning the whole corpus on every query.
The GPU Depreciation Cycle Debate Is Asking the Wrong Question
Short depreciation cycles, long depreciation cycles, and why neoclouds, AI providers, and chipmakers all win either way.
Your Capacity Signals Have a Shelf Life
The bottleneck always moves — why capacity engineering looks more like managing a Costco than setting signals once and walking away.
Anything That Can Be Capitalized Eventually Gets Operationalized
A structural pattern has reshaped servers, labor, and software licenses. AI is now running the same playbook — simultaneously — on software production and human capital.
Agent Skills: Teaching AI Agents Like You'd Onboard a New Hire
Why the smartest way to teach an AI agent is a Markdown file and a YAML header
Stop Writing Prompts with String Manipulation: Why DSPy Treats LLMs as Typed Functions
How typed function signatures replace prompt engineering for scalable AI products.
Developing AI Taste: Understanding the Positioning Battle in AI
Is your organization looking for AI that thinks with you or for you? Do you need AI that does things with you or does things for you?
Exa and the Economics of Taxing Agentic Information Streams
Exa’s bet that owning agentic web I/O can be as powerful as Stripe owning payment rails—potentially taxing agentic information streams the way Stripe taxes transactions.
Punching Holes in the Mystery: Demystifying Open-Source Software for Non-Technical Readers
Open source is part idealism, part strategy for the IT industry. Like punch-card programming standards, it powered computing and built entire industries with room for profit.