Applied AI Engineering for Infrastructure

Where applied AI meets infrastructure, performance, and security engineering. Field notes on heuristic tools, deterministic systems, and human judgment.
Maria Pennacchi Schotten's Rubik's Cube wolf mosaic, more than a thousand cubes

Applied AI Is Human Augmentation, Not Replacement

Since 2023, I’ve been studying applied AI almost exclusively. I don’t pretend to be a data scientist or ML engineer. Honestly, I don’t think giving up more than twenty years of infrastructure, performance, and security engineering would be smart. I’d end up like a duck: swims, flies, and walks, but doesn’t outperform at any of them. It’s impossible not to get caught up in the vibe-coding thing. I’m not here to criticize anyone shipping and prototyping. A few months back, I heard one of the smartest things anyone’s said about AI, from Naval Ravikant. I’ve been listening to him for a few years now, and his takes are consistently good. I don’t remember the exact words, and I’m not going to chase videos or quotes to nail them down, but it was close to this: “There is no disruption caused by AI. The novelty we’re seeing is the abstraction and conversion of human language into computing language.” Brilliant. ...