Engineering wiki

Practical references for software delivery, SI systems, source quality, evaluation, and controlled execution.

• Private LLMs and hardware-aware inference

  Design local and privately hosted inference around data boundaries, model fit, memory pressure, resource queues, and operational ownership.

• Development Engagements Start With the Existing System

  A useful engineering engagement begins by locating the real operating boundary, not by proposing a tool before the work is understood.

• Engineering Skillsets Work Best as Connected Practices

  Architecture, interface work, data reasoning, testing, and operational communication reinforce one another when they are applied to the same bounded problem.

• Repository Workflow Is a Form of Risk Control

  A repository workflow makes ownership, contracts, validation, and unrelated work visible before a source change becomes hard to unwind.

• Software Architecture Makes Change Legible

  Architecture is useful when it clarifies boundaries, dependencies, failure behavior, and ownership for a change that a team can actually review.

• LLM Methodology: Treat Output as a Proposal

  Language models can accelerate research, drafting, and implementation support when their output is bounded, evaluated, and kept separate from human authority.

• Retrieval Begins With Source Quality

  Retrieval is not a substitute for data stewardship. It depends on source identity, freshness, provenance, and an interface that can show uncertainty.

• Model Selection Should Follow the Evaluation Boundary

  Choose a model against documented task criteria, then re-evaluate when the task, context, tools, or model version changes.

• MCP Integrations Need Contracts, Not Assumptions

  Model Context Protocol can expose prompts, resources, and tools, but exposing a tool is not the same as granting authority for consequential action.

• API and Event Contracts Make Integration Testable

  An integration becomes easier to operate when requests, events, retries, errors, and state transitions are explicit and independently testable.

• Human Approval Is a System Boundary

  Approval should be scoped to an identifiable action and supported by policy and evidence, rather than inferred from a model suggestion or a tool's availability.

• Testing and Observability Answer Different Questions

  Tests establish selected behavior before release; observability helps a team understand what happened afterward. Neither is complete proof alone.

• Deployment and Handoff Are Separate Decisions

  A source change can be ready for review without being authorized for deployment. A useful handoff states the evidence, remaining risk, and next decision plainly.

• Rust Systems Security: Memory Safety Supports Authority Work

  Rust ownership, borrowing, and explicit error results make low-level authority paths easier to reason about, while unsafe code and dependencies still require review.

• TypeScript Contracts: Interfaces Need Runtime Boundaries

  TypeScript makes application contracts easier to express and refactor, but runtime validation and a narrow Gateway adapter still decide whether external input is safe to use.

• SQL Durability: Transactions, Receipts, and Audit Truth

  SQLite transactions support local durable authority state, while PostgreSQL provides a migration foundation for broader audit workloads; neither database makes a workflow replay-proof alone.