Hey this is Isaac, Hamel Husain and I are doing a free public talk on why better RAG starts with late interaction. Most RAG still follows the "embed the chunks, embed the query, compare the vectors” approach. But top retrieval architectures follow a new approach. People do not upgrade because it requires a different setup and they think it’s only an incremental improvement. Companies like Nvidia, AWS, and Cursor have adopted it because it’s a big step up. It’s not just benchmark games. A...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Hey this is Isaac, Hamel Husain and I are doing a free public talk on tool architecture anti-patterns for agents: MCP, skills, CLIs, plugins, and custom tools. Some of the most popular and widely used skills, CLIs, and mcp’s fall into one of these anti-patterns. Is MCP good? Are skills enough? Should this be a CLI? That is the wrong starting point. A tool call is a product surface and should be created with the same care given to any other user facing page. When it’s treated like plumbing to...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Today's post is about a project that I will take concepts from to improve my own work. So I studied the OSS prototype of it to understand how it works. Point and Talk: How Clicky’s AI Interface Works Clicky is an AI buddy made by Farza that lives on your Mac. You press a key, talk, and a glowing blue triangle flies across your screen, points at whatever you asked about, and talks you through the answer. Most apps with an agent should have something like this. Point and talk is closer to how...
2 months ago • 6 min read
Last week I shared my knowledge base tool, agentkb. This week I am OSSing my pi harness that uses it, Harpy. The most interesting part of the harness is that knowledge base <-> harness integration so that's what this week post dives into. It covers what RLM is, how it drives a python loop with state, how Pi (typscript) extension talks to python, and how that allows for smart delegation and fan-out to smaller models to give more accurate search results. How My RLM Tool Works An LLM writes...
3 months ago • 9 min read
Hey, This was a week of context switching 😅. Product release weeks are always odd. The goal is super specific, and yet the work is scattered small tasks (testing, polish, docs, marketing copy, etc.). We shipped the stoa beta, and I kept wishing my agents could remember more. That's why I'm open sourcing `agentkb`, my work-in-progress knowledge base framework today. The Pi harness built around it will be open sourced next. AgentKB: A Local Knowledge Base for Agents My agent should learn from...
3 months ago • 6 min read
I'm open-sourcing my personal writing app, Raw2Draft. It's the first of several tools I'll be releasing over the coming months. Next is the knowledge base framework I use. Then an agent harness setup build on top of Pi (if it goes well). Personal tools have gotten cheap to build. Tools that work exactly how you think. Should you use mine? Probably not. It wasn't designed for you. But if writing is part of what you do, you should consider building your own. Point your agent at this repo (and...
3 months ago • 4 min read
Hey all, I spent the week working on concurrency issues. It was a good reminder that at scale, you have to understand the details of how things work. Everyone "knows" this, but with agents, it is easy to fool yourself into thinking you deeply understand what you've built. That the foundation is stronger than it really is. So today's post is about the problem called Cognitive Debt. Next week(ish) will be a write-up on the architecture and design for my personal text editor/writing tool. It's a...
3 months ago • 4 min read
Two new posts today. Oh, and we went out to get my wife new hairspray. It turned out the store is next to a petsmart. So now we have a cat. The first post is AI Coding Patterns 1: Vibe Coding. This is the first of an 18 post series on AI Coding. The series will build from here into more deliberate patterns and pitfalls The second (subscriber only) is My AI Writing Process. People ask me about this constantly. Few people talk about their AI writing process publicly, so I wanted to share mine....
4 months ago • 1 min read
Hey this is Isaac, This week has been about closing loops. I'm releasing the DevRelifier (product for helping share and promote tech stuff), which means dealing with the unsexy parts of software development: tax setup and final testing. It’s less about coding creative features and more about ensuring the business actually works without breaking the law or the user experience. If you want to try the product, reply to this email for more info and free credits. The Build: The Unsexy Last Mile...
8 months ago • 2 min read