As a sysadmin many moons ago, I had about 5 email servers under my purview. Considered mission critical, I had a monitoring dashboard on my computer running at all times such that certain colored or blinking lights would alert me to a potential issue. Here I am again with a stack of cloud servers, so… Continue reading
I’m checking my own stack, after reading an excellent summary written by Shelly Palmer: How Anthropic Thinks About Agents, Workflows and Tasks. Her article is based upon a talk given by Barry Zhang/Anthropic at an AI Engineer conference in 2025. I’ll embed the video if you want to see his entire talk. Summarizing the summary:… Continue reading
for this Breaking News: Yesterday, a very prolific platform, Vercel, announced a security incident. You can read the details here. And guess who is using Vercel? Moi. So, I immediately prompted Claude to assess potential vulnerabilities in my stack. Fortunately, a decision I made early on for completely different reasons turned out to be the… Continue reading
(Continued from: Building It Right — Staging, Compliance, and Analytics) The previous three parts of this series covered the bumpy road from a laptop running Docker containers to a cloud-deployed system with a staging environment, compliance guardrails, and real observability. By the end of that phase, I had something I could stand behind. GPT-4o-mini was… Continue reading
(Continued from: Moving to the Cloud — and Finding the Right Model) By this point the core system was working. GPT-4o-mini was holding context, the product cards were giving customers a tangible output, and the hallucination problem was largely under control. I could have pushed to production and called it done. Instead I built a… Continue reading
(Continued from: What If a Dispensary Had an AI on Staff?) The local build had done its job. I knew the concept worked. I knew what the limitations were. Now I needed something I could actually demo to a dispensary owner without carrying my laptop into the store. The move to the cloud was surprisingly… Continue reading
A new category. I come across things that I feel compelled to play with and it likely doesn’t have anything to do with projects here. The first toy: Soot Spiral. This visual search came across my radar maybe a year ago. I recently re-visited it and was enthralled. Kinda makes me dizzy, but it’s nonetheless… Continue reading
(Continued from the AI Budtender Project) The AI Budtender is a customer-facing assistant that helps cannabis dispensary customers find products, get personalized recommendations, and build shopping lists — all powered by live inventory and purchase history. These are the details of the oft bumpy road that lead to the MVP. The first version was about… Continue reading
As much as I’ve enjoyed posting on Esprit de AI, maintaining two sites takes too much time. I’ve essentially copied Esprit de AI here to maintain the continuity of my AI journey. You’ll see more details on the projects taking shape as well as the tools I’m using and the ones I’ve discarded. Buckle up… Continue reading
I leaned heavily on ChatGPT (“Chat”—we’re on a first-name basis now) for automation and scripting guidance. We started in Zapier. Juggling actions, triggers, and scripts led to nothing but QuickBooks errors. So we switched to Make. After several rounds of modifications, Chat insisted I click an area to “Add another Line Item.” I couldn’t find… Continue reading