The notebook
Notes
Field notes from real jobs. Field-tested means it shipped and survived. On the bench means I'm still collecting evidence — published anyway, because a real workbench has unfinished work on it.
The Human Brain Was Not Built for the Infinite Feed
John's field note on information overload, family, trust, local AI, and why private AI systems are not about hiding — they are about keeping human agency alive.
Body-Adjacent AI Needs a Kill Switch on Our Side
If AI is moving into glasses, cars, tools, workshops and eventually body-adjacent interfaces, the off switch cannot live in the cloud.
Fable 5 Feels Like Two Models in One
An operator's observation from tool-heavy sessions with Claude Fable 5: it behaves less like a single plain model and more like a front controller in front of a reasoning engine — and that pattern is exactly how we should be building our own agent systems.
Why I Rebuilt My AI Agent’s Memory Instead of Blaming the Model
John explains why messy long-term AI agent memory caused false positives, bad routing and unreliable behaviour — and how cleaning memory made Hermes Agent safer and more useful.
Why Prompting Is Becoming Spec Writing
Chat prompts are questions. Agent prompts are work orders: scope, authorization, boundaries, acceptance criteria. The skill that matters now is the one engineers always hated doing.
The Real Problem With AI Agents Is Context Selection
Agents don't usually fail because the model is too small. They fail because the wrong slice of reality was in the window when the decision got made.
What Auto Diagnostics Taught Me About AI Debugging
Twenty years of fault-finding on vehicles maps almost one-to-one onto debugging AI systems: observe, hypothesise, test one variable, verify the fix — and never trust the fault code.
Building Local AI Like a Workshop, Not a Toy
Eight 3090s, a Proxmox host, and a rule: every machine earns its keep. Local AI infrastructure built like workshop equipment — bought for jobs, not for benchmarks.
Why Useful Agents Need Verifiers, Not Just Bigger Models
The cheapest reliability upgrade in any agent system isn't a smarter model — it's a second pass that checks the first one's work before it leaves the building.