posts
filtered by #architecture clear
AI-Native Redesign: The Principles Don't Change — Only the Machinery Does
Every organization eventually faces the same design problem: keeping important information stored, current, and reachable at scale. This post frames that as a three-node loop (creation / maintenance / consumption) and works through what redesigning it with AI as a given looks like, as opposed to bolting AI onto a human-first setup. Along the way it recasts earlier posts on cortex — code-graph, product-graph, AI-Observability, auto-review harness — as different applications of the same underlying principle.
AI Isn't Something to Trust — It's Something to Design
Series Final. The four mechanisms covered across this series — knowledge graph, Auto Review, Self-Healing, Recurrence Prevention — plus the non-engineer-PR application that sits on top of them, all hang off a single conviction: AI isn't something to trust; it's something to design. The 'I don't trust AI to fill in the blanks for me' framing this lives inside isn't doubt about generation quality, but the clear-eyed acceptance that AI has no idea what context wasn't handed to it, and that 'ideal behavior with no spec given' is a fantasy. The starting point goes back to 2025, when I was trying to figure out how to make AI actually understand a large codebase — and ran into walls on both context window scaling (lost in the middle, attention dilution) and learning-based approaches (machine unlearning, destructive interference). GraphRAG + MCP became the way out: hand AI only the facts it needs, when it needs them, so it doesn't have to infer. From code-graph (which I burned two months on and threw away) to the current product-graph (cpg). This piece is the philosophy and the trial-and-error behind the whole series: harnesses confine where hallucinations are allowed to happen, design is translating principles into your own use cases, and Coverage 90% as a solo target breaks the implementation.
Cutting Self-Built MCP Server Token Usage by 90% — The Parking Pattern
MCP responses fill the context window fast. The parking pattern stores heavy payloads externally and returns only a key — about 90% token savings in production.