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Matthew Gribben Blog

Thoughts on AI systems, distributed architecture, security, and software craftsmanship.

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Bounded Execution and Selective Memory

The only way an agentic system compounds instead of accumulating sludge is if work is decomposed into bounded, auditable units, context is explicitly assembled per unit, execution produces first-class evidence, and only some of that evidence is deliberately promoted into durable, scoped memory.

Context as a Compiled Artefact

RAG and 'give the model everything and let it figure it out' are the same mistake at different levels of sophistication. Context that can be trusted across time, across agents, and across policy changes must be the output of a deterministic lowering pipeline with explicit invariants, not the input to one.

The Two Layers of Governance

Almost every agentic system conflates two completely different problems: what the model is allowed to *know* for a given purpose, and what it is allowed to *do*. Treating them as one thing produces the worst of both worlds.

LLMs Are Not Control Planes

Markdown skills, LLM wikis, and 'the model will stay on the rails' approaches feel like progress. They are local maxima that rot by design. The failure is architectural, not a matter of scale or prompting.

The Overstochastic Default

Most agentic development today is building the exciting half of the system and hoping the boring half takes care of itself. It doesn't. The result is systems that impress in demos and quietly decay in production.

Running llama.cpp on a Mac Pro 6,1 with Dual FirePro D700s on Ubuntu

A D700-specific guide to running llama.cpp with Vulkan on the 2013 Mac Pro: dual 6 GB FirePro cards, Ubuntu, RADV, full GPU offload, cooling, and the traps that make old GCN hardware look slower than it is.

Integrating Microsoft Copilot with OpenClaw: A Vibe‑Coder’s Guide to Free AI Superpowers

If you’ve spent any time inside OpenClaw, you already know it’s a playground for people who like to wire weird things together and see what happens. It’s a workflow engine, an automation surface, a security research toybox, and—if you squint—a universal adapter for anything with an API. So naturally, the next question becomes: what if OpenClaw could talk to Microsoft Copilot?

Why Planner-Worker Systems Usually Beat Agent Swarms

Most multi-agent systems fail because teams mix up reasoning, memory, and orchestration. Planner-worker designs usually win because they keep coordination explicit, contexts narrow, and failure easier to debug.

Stop Buying Bigger Context Windows

Most token burn in agent systems is self-inflicted. The real problem is usually not the hard context limit but context rot: too much stale state, too much raw tool output, and too little discipline about what belongs in the prompt.

Memory for Agents Is a Systems Problem, Not a Context Window Problem

Memory failures in agents are rarely solved by larger context windows. The real problem is systems design: how information is stored, selected, retrieved, compacted, and promoted into durable forms.

Regression Testing for Identity Policy: Baselines, Change Impact, and MSP-Scale Conditional Access

Once you can simulate Conditional Access decisions, the next step is operational discipline: baselines, versioned expected outcomes, change impact analysis, and regression testing across one tenant or many.

Static Review Is Not Enough: Why Conditional Access Needs More Than Defined Test Scenarios

If Conditional Access behaviour depends on sign-in context, client path, device state, service dependencies, and policy interaction, then static review alone is not enough. Defined scenarios help, but exhaustive deterministic simulation goes further.

Why Conditional Access Feels Unpredictable: How Gaps Appear from Unrelated Changes

Conditional Access feels random not because the engine is unpredictable, but because real access outcomes depend on apps, dependencies, exclusions, scope drift, device state, network context, and session timing outside the visible policy list.

Atomic Actions: Why AI Agents Need Smaller Building Blocks

Exploring why breaking down agent behaviors into atomic, verifiable units leads to more reliable and debuggable AI systems.

Conditional Access Is Not a Firewall: How Entra ID Conditional Access Actually Works

Conditional Access is not a firewall for Microsoft 365. It is a policy engine in the Entra sign-in and token issuance path, and that difference explains a lot of the confusion people have about how it behaves.

From Trajectories to Memories: How Agents Should Remember and Learn From Their Work

Agent memory should not be built from chat transcripts alone. Agents should capture structured work trajectories, store them sanely, segment them into episodes, and distill them into durable facts, lessons, and procedures.

Zero-Knowledge Proofs in Production: Lessons Learned

Practical insights from implementing ZK circuits at scale, covering performance optimization, security considerations, and common pitfalls.

The Case for Incremental Knowledge Graphs

How atomic knowledge generation can create more robust and verifiable AI knowledge bases compared to monolithic embeddings.

Distributed Systems Patterns for Multi-Agent Coordination

Applying consensus protocols and distributed state management to coordinate autonomous AI agents at scale.

Security-First Architecture for AI Applications

Building AI systems with security as a foundational concern, from input validation to output sanitization and model isolation.

Foreign scam calls are a signalling problem, not just a nuisance

Scam calls that arrive wearing a UK number are not magic. They are a consequence of weak trust at the handoff between networks, and foreign VoIP providers sit right in that gap. Blocking them will not solve fraud, but it can raise the cost of abuse enough to matter.

Why telecom fraud keeps winning, and why the network has to be replaced

Phone scams are not just a consumer problem. They expose a structural trust flaw in telecoms that patching can only soften, not remove. If the network still treats caller identity as a polite request, fraud will keep finding a way through.

Sony, Discord, and the Real Asset in Gaming Platforms

Sony did not just buy a chat integration. It bought leverage over where gaming communities already live, and that matters more than another box feature. The real story is the social graph, not the voice codec.