Blog
Engineering notes on retrieval, conversational AI, evaluation, production systems, and runtime governance.
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Orchestration Is Not Governance
Agent systems inherit decades of orchestration engineering, but orchestration does not answer whether a previously justified consequence remains justified when the system is ready to act.
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The Six Substrate Dimensions
A falsifiable question about which runtime facts remain governance-relevant as execution technology changes, using six candidate dimensions as a working hypothesis.
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The Protocol Between Agents Is the Protocol Between Teams
An engineering argument that agent handoffs also carry responsibility, authority, state, escalation, evidence, and failure semantics, drawing on lessons from enterprise systems.
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Causal Decomposition Under Suspended Judgment: Two Cases from Keystone
Two cases in diagnosing governed AI failures at the mechanism level: a three-factor retrieval bug (FC-005) and a day-one multi-agent substrate decision. The discipline is suspending judgment long enough to find every cause before acting on any of them.
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Provana AcuteCare: Clinical Copilot with Guardrails
A clinical AI copilot with role-based action guardrails. Three protocols (sepsis, stroke, pediatric fever), dynamic UI generation, four governance outcomes (Serve, Block, Route, Mutate). Built in six hours at the Boston AI Tinkerers hackathon. The prototype reused several existing authorization and action-control patterns without requiring structural changes during the hackathon implementation. That is an implementation observation, not evidence of clinical suitability, portability, or validation.
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Governed Incident Response: Agentic UI with RBAC and Audit Trails
A hackathon prototype where every tool call in the demo is checked against the user's role and logged to an append-only, tamper-evident-by-design audit trail. The agent generates different UI depending on what the user is allowed to do. CopilotKit + Next.js generative UI. Built solo for the AI Tinkerers Generative UI Hackathon, Boston.