Fragments
Notes in passing.
Short observations, definitions and half-formed positions. Most of them don't need a whole distillation; they just need to be said.
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What I mean by “distillation”
A distillation is not a simplification. Nothing is lost. It is a separation: the idea is pulled apart until the part that carries the meaning sits alone, and the rest is understood as packaging.
You know a distillation worked when the intimidating version and the plain version turn out to be the same sentence, just said in different vocabularies.
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Systems fail at the seams
Most multi-agent failures I see are not model failures. They are seam failures: two components that each do their job well, connected by an assumption nobody wrote down.
The fix is rarely a better model. It is making the seam explicit — naming the contract, the failure mode, and who is responsible when it breaks.
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Equations are compressed sentences
The BM25 formula looks hostile for about ten seconds. Then you notice it is three ordinary ideas stacked: how often, how rare, how long.
Notation is not difficulty. It is density. The job is to unpack it without losing the precision it was buying.
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Local-first is a values choice that happens to be engineering
On-device inference is slower than a datacenter and always will be. People choose it anyway, for the same reason they close the bathroom door.
Privacy is not a feature list. It is the ability to say: this never leaves my machine — and have that be literally true.
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The demo is the easy part
A demo shows the path that works once. A product survives every path that fails later.
Evaluations, retries, guardrails and boring error paths are where the actual work lives — and the least visible part of any agent system.
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Meaning has geometry
The strangest idea in modern search is that meaning can have coordinates — that “cat” and “kitten” are close, and “car” is far, in a space nobody drew.
Once you accept the geometry, cosine similarity stops being a formula and becomes a question: do these two arrows point the same way?