Blog
Thoughts and technical writings
Building Snow: Persistent Memory for AI Agents
March 13, 2026
How I built Snow, an MCP server that gives AI agents persistent, contextual memory through a local SQLite database with FTS5 search and typed metadata schemas.
Read more →Customizing OpenCode with Specialized Subagents
March 2, 2026
How I configured OpenCode with a primary coding agent and specialized subagents for research and debugging, with tailored temperature settings and tool access.
Read more →Building Guardrails Without Breaking Agent Capabilities
November 15, 2025
The tension between safety and capability in agent design, and how to build constraints that prevent bad outcomes without rendering agents useless.
Read more →The Cost of Autonomy: Optimizing Agent Token Usage
September 8, 2025
How I discovered 40% of my token budget was going to waste, and the strategies I use to optimize costs without sacrificing quality.
Read more →Hard-won lessons about observability, cost control, human-agent interaction, and why simple agents outperform clever ones.
Read more →Production Patterns for Multi-Agent Systems
May 20, 2025
Patterns that work for coordinating multiple agents: hub-and-spoke coordination, shared state management, and graceful degradation.
Read more →Why accuracy alone tells you nothing useful about agent performance, and the multi-dimensional evaluation framework I use instead.
Read more →The Human in the Loop: Designing Agent Handoffs
January 18, 2025
Designing effective collaboration patterns between humans and agents, from escalation handoffs to approval gates and input requests.
Read more →When Agents Go Rogue: Debugging Autonomous Systems
November 30, 2024
What to do when your agent burns through API quotas at 2 AM, and the systematic approach to debugging autonomous systems.
Read more →Making AI Agents Explain Themselves
September 14, 2024
The difference between post-hoc explanations and embedded reasoning, and why explainability is crucial for trusting autonomous systems.
Read more →The Observability Gap in Agentic Systems
July 22, 2024
Why traditional monitoring approaches fail for AI agents, and the three critical gaps: decision visibility, cost attribution, and quality signals.
Read more →Building Tool Harnesses That Don't Break
May 10, 2024
How fragile tool integrations can bring down your entire agent, and the defensive patterns that make systems resilient to external API changes.
Read more →Why Your AI Agent Needs Better Logging
March 15, 2024
Why most agent logging is a firehose of noise, and how decision-tree logging transformed my debugging workflow from hours to minutes.
Read more →Building Scalable ML Infrastructure
January 15, 2024
Lessons learned from transitioning monolithic ML applications to microservices architecture and the impact on performance and maintainability.
Read more →The Art of Code Review in Cross-Functional Teams
December 8, 2023
How to conduct effective code reviews when working with data scientists, product managers, and other non-engineering stakeholders.
Read more →From Prototype to Production: ML Model Deployment
November 22, 2023
A practical guide to taking machine learning models from Jupyter notebooks to production-ready systems that scale.
Read more →© 2026 Matt Emmons