https://alir.me/writing/Recent content in Writing on Ali RathoreHugoen-usWed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://alir.me/writing/the-honest-default-is-no/Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://alir.me/writing/the-honest-default-is-no/Four systems that do nothing alike share their most important line of code, the one that runs when the system has no idea, and in all four it refuses.https://alir.me/writing/inducing-the-schema/Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://alir.me/writing/inducing-the-schema/The unsolved part of document AI is discovering the columns, not filling them, and a column should only exist if it pays for itself in bits.https://alir.me/writing/one-validation-too-early/Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://alir.me/writing/one-validation-too-early/The abstractions I have had to delete were not wrong, they were premature, built to answer a question the work had not yet asked.https://alir.me/writing/a-good-average-hides-the-column-that-matters/Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://alir.me/writing/a-good-average-hides-the-column-that-matters/A synthetic dataset that scores well on average can still be useless and unsafe, so the only scores worth trusting gate on the worst part and fail closed.https://alir.me/writing/point-dont-drag/Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://alir.me/writing/point-dont-drag/Drag-and-drop is the wrong handle for steering a model that builds your interface, because the thing you grab and the thing it wrote stopped being one-to-one the moment a list appeared.https://alir.me/writing/the-harness-remembers/Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://alir.me/writing/the-harness-remembers/The coding agent starts every build with no memory of the last one, so the system that runs it got better by writing down where the agent kept failing.https://alir.me/writing/letting-an-agent-merge-to-main/Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://alir.me/writing/letting-an-agent-merge-to-main/Autonomy is not something the model has. It is the set of gates you are willing to put around it, and an audit trail of everything it did inside them.https://alir.me/writing/watching-an-agent-work/Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://alir.me/writing/watching-an-agent-work/The interesting part of an agent is not that it acts, it is the shared room where you can see what it sees, point at things, and take the controls back.https://alir.me/writing/a-turn-is-not-a-request/Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://alir.me/writing/a-turn-is-not-a-request/An agent’s unit of work is a long-lived process, and the moment you treat it like an HTTP request you lose the run every time a laptop sleeps.https://alir.me/writing/managing-engineers-who-never-sleep/Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://alir.me/writing/managing-engineers-who-never-sleep/A year of running AI coding agents turned into an accidental management apparatus, written one rule at a time.https://alir.me/writing/agents-enterprise-data/Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://alir.me/writing/agents-enterprise-data/Trust in agentic systems is an architecture property, not a model property.https://alir.me/writing/your-gold-set-is-lying-to-you/Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://alir.me/writing/your-gold-set-is-lying-to-you/Reference answers are artifacts with bugs, and they are the only software in the stack that nobody code-reviews.https://alir.me/writing/answers-you-cannot-audit/Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://alir.me/writing/answers-you-cannot-audit/Provenance is a data-model property, not a UI feature, and it cannot be retrofitted.https://alir.me/writing/authorization-for-answers/Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://alir.me/writing/authorization-for-answers/We have learned to secure what agents do. The harder question is what they are allowed to know.https://alir.me/writing/evaluating-systems-that-answer-in-sentences/Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://alir.me/writing/evaluating-systems-that-answer-in-sentences/Evaluation infrastructure is the difference between a demo and a product.https://alir.me/writing/llm-spend-is-an-attribution-problem/Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://alir.me/writing/llm-spend-is-an-attribution-problem/A month of anonymous model spend taught me that cost governance for AI is identity infrastructure, and the discipline that fixes it already has a name.https://alir.me/writing/data-infrastructure-ai-infrastructure/Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://alir.me/writing/data-infrastructure-ai-infrastructure/They optimize for different things, fail in different ways, and the hard problems live at the seam.https://alir.me/writing/why-your-knowledge-graph-isnt-helping-your-rag/Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://alir.me/writing/why-your-knowledge-graph-isnt-helping-your-rag/We nearly published the fashionable verdict that GraphRAG is hype. The audit found something better, the structural reasons the published architectures break on enterprise data.https://alir.me/writing/physical-world-does-not-retry/Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://alir.me/writing/physical-world-does-not-retry/What burger-making robots taught me about agents acting on production data.https://alir.me/writing/the-model-designs-the-code-enforces/Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://alir.me/writing/the-model-designs-the-code-enforces/In an LLM ingestion pipeline, the model gets the judgment that requires reading the document and nothing else. The surprise is how badly the prompt wants to violate that in both directions.https://alir.me/writing/database-lessons-for-the-agent-era/Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://alir.me/writing/database-lessons-for-the-agent-era/Agent platforms are rediscovering, one incident at a time, what database engines settled decades ago.https://alir.me/writing/tables-are-images/Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://alir.me/writing/tables-are-images/Meaning in a table lives in its geometry, and the architecture that survives a real corpus is a per-table router, not an ideology.https://alir.me/writing/what-regulation-does-to-architecture/Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://alir.me/writing/what-regulation-does-to-architecture/Years of healthcare engineering taught me that compliance, taken seriously, is a design input that produces better systems.https://alir.me/writing/when-documents-become-databases/Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://alir.me/writing/when-documents-become-databases/Schema discovery is a corpus-statistics problem before it is a modeling problem.https://alir.me/writing/free-like-a-puppy-times-fifteen/Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://alir.me/writing/free-like-a-puppy-times-fifteen/A product assembled from open source is not the sum of its components. It is the resolution of their disagreements.https://alir.me/writing/forcing-the-race/Mon, 20 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://alir.me/writing/forcing-the-race/Race conditions are not hard to test. They are untested, because teams accept probabilistic reproduction.