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Notes from the practice.

Shorter, occasional writing — the things that don’t fit a pattern post. Plain-spoken, senior, no pitch.

The Three Generations of RAG Retrieval-augmented generation has moved through three generations — a fixed pipeline, an agentic loop, and a parallel orchestration over many sources. Read them as replacements and you'll reach for the newest and skip the foundation. Each generation wraps the one beneath it; the vocabulary of the first is the substrate the rest stand on. Harnessing Volatility in Production Agents demo beautifully and then fall over in production — not because the model is weak, but because its output is volatile and the system around it was never built to govern that. Reliability is an architecture problem, a governance problem, and an evaluation problem before it is a model problem. The Right Tool for the Loop Agents now have to touch real systems, and two patterns have emerged to let them — the Model Context Protocol and the humble command line. Read it as a contest and you'll pick wrong. The question was never which protocol wins. It's which loop you're in. The Illusion of the AI Operating Layer Enterprise AI is converging on a horizontal operating layer — gateways, protocols, generic agent UIs. That convergence is the trap. The defensible value isn't the wiring everyone shares; it's the governed, high-stakes domain underneath it.

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