• Generative AI

    From Empty Cluster to a Production-Ready GenAI Service

    November 3, 2026 - By 

    A GenAI backend can pass a demo and still be unfit to operate: the answer looks plausible while its source document belongs to another tenant, its index is stale, or its retrieval call consumes the entire request budget. I would build the first production setup around an enforceable retrieval boundary, not model optimization, because access and failure behavior are harder to retrofit than prompts. The first deployable unit is an authorized document pipeline Begin with one source of truth: a document store whose records have a stable document ID, tenant ID, source version, and access policy. Give the ingestion worker…

  • Robotics

    5 Robotics Team Mistakes That Cost Junior Devs Weeks

    October 29, 2026 - By 

    A robot that moves on a developer’s laptop has passed an onboarding exercise, not a release test. I would not start an automation project by adding a planner or splitting nodes across machines, because neither fixes the failures a short demo rarely exposes: stale sensor data, inconsistent clocks, and commands that outlive the connection that sent them. Teams pay for that confusion in debugging time first and unsafe motion later. A moving bot is a poor release criterion because the demo hides failure modes Read ROS 2 on a laptop in 60 minutes from install to moving bot, then replay…

  • Cryptocurrencies

    2024 Crypto Runbooks Fail Production in 2026

    October 22, 2026 - By 

    A wallet request can time out after it has been broadcast, leaving the caller unable to tell whether retrying will create a second transfer. Since 2024, delegated accounts and more varied transaction paths have made that uncertainty harder to contain. My position: a production wallet needs a durable intent record before it needs another signing integration. If no component owns recovery, scaling workers only scales the ambiguity. The old build-or-buy boundary no longer matches the recovery boundary I disagree with Your 2024 Crypto Build-vs-Buy Playbook Is Obsolete if its sourcing question is treated as the production decision: buying signing, RPC,…

  • Robotics

    CTO, Score Robotics Stacks Before You Build or Buy

    October 13, 2026 - By 

    A vision API can win a demo and lose the procurement decision: the invoice may be predictable while data retention, camera drift, and migration remain untested. For a first production app, I would buy inference only from a vendor that passes a priced exit test. If the contract or interface prevents that test, I would start with a licensed model running in-house, even if its initial accuracy is lower. A vendor trial should start with an exit test, not a leaderboard Before asking vendors for accuracy claims, write down what you would need to replace them. That means access to…

  • Generative AI

    RAG vs Fine-Tuning in Your First GenAI Backend

    October 6, 2026 - By 

    A coding assistant does not need to understand an entire repository before it can answer a developer’s question. It needs to find the right code, show where it found it, and avoid presenting stale guesses as facts. For a first implementation, I would choose live repository search over a vector index. Embeddings become worthwhile when real questions repeatedly defeat symbol and text search—not simply because the feature uses generative AI. Live repository search is the better default for code questions Consider a developer asking, “Where do we reject an expired session token?” The likely answer has a function name, an…

  • Generative AI

    CTOs, Your 2024 GenAI Build-vs-Buy Playbook Is Outdated

    September 30, 2026 - By 

    “Build or buy the AI” is the wrong question for a CTO in 2026. The useful boundary is narrower: buy model capability until your own evidence shows that owning inference or training improves the economics. Build the evaluation, data controls, and fallback paths yourself. Those assets remain valuable when an API price changes, an open-weight model improves, or a supplier’s terms stop fitting your product. The default has shifted from owning a model to owning the decision boundary Two years ago, advice to prototype with an API and then train a custom model often sounded like a natural progression. I…

  • Cryptocurrencies

    Your 2024 Crypto Build-vs-Buy Playbook Is Obsolete

    September 29, 2026 - By 

    A wallet decision that looked sensible in 2024 can be an expensive mistake in 2026. Ethereum accounts can now delegate execution logic, while custody vendors offer increasingly complete signing and policy services. I would buy the signing and key-custody layer for most teams, then build the transaction policy and recovery process in-house. The exception is a company whose wallet infrastructure is itself the product. Ethereum’s account changes weakened the case for building a signer first Before Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade, a common argument for an in-house wallet stack was that externally owned accounts could not support enough application-specific behavior. That argument…

  • Generative AI

    Your GenAI Feature Scales Until Retrieval and Latency Collide

    September 22, 2026 - By 

    Generative AI for software development does not fail first because the model writes bad code; it fails first because the organization cannot review, test, attribute, and govern the extra code volume. My position is deliberately narrow: a product manager should scope the rollout as a throughput and control-plane project, because assistant licenses are easy to buy and hard to operationalize. The first bottleneck is human review, because AI increases change volume before it increases trust The uncomfortable scaling limit is not prompt quality; it is reviewer capacity, because generated code still arrives as a pull request that someone accountable must…

  • Cryptocurrencies

    At 10x users, your crypto wallet breaks at idempotency

    September 21, 2026 - By 

    Crypto wallet scaling usually fails before anyone finds a cryptographic flaw. My position: a product manager should scope the first scale milestone around signing operations, approvals, nonce control, and reconciliation, because those queues break before BIP-39 words, secp256k1 math, or storage diagrams do. Treat secure storage as necessary plumbing, not the center of the roadmap. The signing queue breaks before the key ceremony does The team can treat Cryptocurrency Wallets for Developers Secure Storage Guide as the storage baseline, but the first scaling risk is usually not whether a private key is encrypted; it is whether the product can decide,…

  • Robotics

    ROS 2 on a laptop in 60 minutes from install to moving bot

    September 14, 2026 - By 

    A junior robotics setup should start as a boring ROS 2 system in a container, not as a heroic hardware sprint. My position: simulation-first is the fastest honest path to a working robot because it exposes topics, timing, transforms, and failures before motors can hide them behind drama. Your first robot should be fake because fake robots fail faster I would not begin by buying a physical robot arm, because a wrong tf2 frame, inverted motor direction, or blocking callback can turn a 5-minute software mistake into damaged hardware and an afternoon of guessing. Start with a simulated node graph…