About the author
Ken W Alger
@kenwalger
Developer educator and advocate who still ships code. 15 years teaching developers at MongoDB, Heroku, Cisco, and Treehouse. Now writing about AI-assisted development, agent memory, and provenance.
Oregon
May 8
The Inference Renaissance
Pattern Defined Precise Definition: Inference Patterns are repeatable architectural...
May 7
The Local Eye (Sovereign Vision)
We’ve built a system that is Reliable, Affordable, and Governed. But until now, our Forensic Team has...
May 6
Why Your Tech Stack Doesn’t Matter
Why your tech stack doesn’t matter when building multi-agent systems. Learn the three architectural principles that determine reliability: state, context, and control.
May 6
When Your AI Pipeline Grows Up: Infrastructure Thinking for Real-Time Inference at Scale
There’s a familiar arc in AI development. A team builds a model, wires up a pipeline, and ships it....
May 5
The Backyard Quarry, Part 8: From Rocks to Reality
At the beginning of this series, the problem seemed simple. There were a lot of rocks in the...
Apr 30
The Guardian: Human-in-the-Loop AI Governance
Autonomous agents are a liability for high-stakes enterprise decisions. Learn how to build 'The Guardian'—a stateful Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) checkpoint that requires a human to sign off on high-severity findings before they are committed to the record.
Apr 29
What I’ve Been Building: Systems, AI, and Real-World Data
Over the past several weeks, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about systems. Some of that...
Apr 28
The Backyard Quarry, Part 7: Systems Beyond the Backyard
By now, the Backyard Quarry system has grown beyond its original intent. We started with a pile of...
Apr 23
The Accountant: Optimizing AI Costs with Semantic Routing
Stop overpaying for AI reasoning. Learn how to build 'The Accountant'—a semantic router that uses local SLMs to classify task complexity and slash inference costs by up to 80%.
Apr 21
The Backyard Quarry, Part 6: Scaling the Quarry
So far, the Backyard Quarry system has worked well. We have: a schema a capture process ...
Apr 16
Who Audits the Auditors? Building an LLM-as-a-Judge for Agentic Reliability
Stop "vibe-checking" your AI agents. Learn how to build a production-grade 'Judge Agent' that audits your team against a Golden Dataset, providing quantitative reliability scores and an automated path to optimization.
Apr 15
5.4-Cyber and the Death of the Static CI/CD Pipeline
OpenAI’s 5.4-Cyber release just changed the rules of DevSecOps. If your pipeline isn't autonomous by the end of 2026, it's a liability. Here's why.