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Agent infrastructure & DX

AI agents and developer tooling

My 18 essays and guides on building interfaces for coding agents: agent-first CLIs, MCP tradeoffs, subagent isolation, AST-enforced migrations, and applied machine learning.

Start with the foundational pieces below, or jump to a specific topic. These patterns come from building the open-source Google Workspace CLI, Helen's Foundry, and native Rust tooling with coding agents.

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Core essays on CLI predictability, protocol fidelity, embedded MCP servers, and agent-run code migrations.

  • The MCP Abstraction Tax

    Every layer from App to API to MCP loses fidelity. An exploration of what gets lost and why it matters for enterprise APIs.

  • Your App Should Ship an MCP Server

    Why I embedded an MCP server in a native Rust prose editor so an AI agent can drive, inspect, rebuild, and verify the running app.

  • One Rule, One Throwaway Skill

    Slides from my AI Engineer Code Summit talk on using ast-grep rules and a temporary skill to migrate TypeScript to Effect.

CLI and MCP interface design

Designing command-line tools, MCP servers, and native application interfaces that coding agents can inspect and verify.

  • The MCP Abstraction Tax

    Every layer from App to API to MCP loses fidelity. An exploration of what gets lost and why it matters for enterprise APIs.

  • Your App Should Ship an MCP Server

    Why I embedded an MCP server in a native Rust prose editor so an AI agent can drive, inspect, rebuild, and verify the running app.

  • Abandon Git LFS because AI Agents

    Git LFS causes fatal errors in AI agents like Jules due to proxy conflicts and hook limitations. Learn why I abandoned LFS and migrated back to standard Git.

Workflows, guardrails, and verification

Structuring multi-agent loops, AST rules, permissions, commit identity, and prompt security in real repositories.

  • One Rule, One Throwaway Skill

    Slides from my AI Engineer Code Summit talk on using ast-grep rules and a temporary skill to migrate TypeScript to Effect.

  • Agent Identity for Git Commits

    How to configure AI agents to push commits to GitHub using a separate bot identity without modifying local git configuration.

  • VS Code Git Remote Color

    An open-source VS Code extension that hashes each workspace Git remote and colors the status bar to distinguish open repositories.

Applied ML, benchmarks, and Workspace integrations

Evaluating frontier models, running local ONNX transformers in Rust, and calling Gemini, Vertex AI, and MCP from Google Workspace.