Articles about engineering

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  • An Untested Backup Is a Hypothesis

    My self-hosted AI assistant holds months of irreplaceable personal memory. War stories from making it actually survivable — silent failures, restore drills, and the discipline that turns backups from a checkbox into a guarantee.

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  • The Approval Gateway: Why My AI Assistant Can't Send an Email

    The most important component in my self-hosted AI assistant is the one that says no. Why every outbound action goes through a deterministic approval gate, and why that lives in code, not in a prompt.

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  • Why I Chose Hindsight for My AI Assistant's Memory

    Agent memory is where most personal-AI projects quietly fail. Why my self-hosted assistant uses Hindsight for semantic memory, what kinds of memory it actually captures, and the honest gotchas from running it in production.

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