Nobody Is Waiting
I split my inference by latency sensitivity rather than model size. Once you own the hardware, slow stops being a cost, and every job with no deadline inside the hour can move to the hours you are asleep.
The notebook
Thinking out loud.
Things I've tried, things I've changed my mind about, and things I'm still working through.
The Model Gets a Vote, Not a Veto
My task board runs models at three points in its pipeline, and none of them decide anything. The rule that fell out of building it: put the model where being wrong is cheap, and put deterministic code everywhere being wrong is permanent.
Confirm Before Acting Is Not a Safety Feature
An instruction to an agent is not a control. Before I let anything act on my mail, I built the layer that does not depend on the agent behaving: a read-only, append-only, encrypted copy the agent cannot reach, and a gate it has to pass before it touches a message.
The Output Looked Good
I run shadow jobs to grade my local inference stack against the cloud models. The first thing the test caught was a cloud model fabricating a result from nothing. Reading output is not verification. A diff is.
The AI Was the Prototype
AI is the fastest way to discover the structure of the tool you need. It is the wrong thing to call every time you use that tool. Once the structure is clear, graduate it off the AI runtime.
Your Issue Is Not Unique
Someone, somewhere, has already solved your exact problem or close enough to it. The skill is learning to abstract your query until you can find them.
The Ops Instinct Finds the Friction
The operations reflex is to spot the friction you have stopped noticing and smooth it out. That reflex used to stop at the edge of software. AI moved the edge, and now it reaches the physical things in your house.
What Survives When You Come Back
I left hardware for a decade. When I came back, the toolchain was unrecognizable but the architecture in my head still worked. AI makes that surviving skill useful again.
The Architecture Was Always the Job
AI tools commoditized the building. What survives is the skill that was always the hard part: keeping the architecture of a system in your head and describing it well enough to get something useful out.
When Building Gets Cheap
XKCD 1205 told us when automation was worth the time. AI collapsed that calculation. But the chart measured the wrong cost all along.
When Your Skill Needs to Graduate
AI skills are the fastest way to prove an idea works. When other people need what you built, the skill has taken you as far as it goes.
How Much of Your Business Runs on a Spreadsheet?
The Google Sheet is the most popular application platform in enterprise. AI is finally changing that.