Exploring Ideas: A Blog on Technology, Startups, Food, and More
Welcome to my blog where I share thoughts and insights on technology, startups, and life in Atlanta. Browse through the articles below or explore by topic.
Comparing Python Libraries for Structured LLM Extraction
November 27, 2025
Most enterprise uses of LLMs require structured output. You need JSON objects that fit into databases, validate against schemas, and integrate with existing systems. You can’t just take free-form text and hope it works. The problem is that LLMs generate text. Ask for JSON and you might get it wrapped in markdown code blocks, with extra commentary, missing fields, or wrong types. You get "founded":...
Personal Blogs and the Small Web
November 24, 2025
The beating heart of the internet has also been people just sorta putting things out there. While social media platforms fight over engagement metrics and algorithmic feeds, people are rediscovering something that feels almost radical to some: owning their own little space on the web. A Brief History Personal blogging exploded in 1999. That year alone saw the launch of Blogger, LiveJournal, and Xa...
From Theory to Practice: Building Real Decision Models with Petersburg
November 20, 2025
Last year I wrote about decision making under uncertainty, exploring how expected value calculations break down when facing real-world complexity. I mentioned at the end that I’d built some cool simulations using a project called petersburg, but I didn’t have the images handy and never followed up. Well, I’ve spent some time between JPMC and SVP jobs cleaning up that project, adding examples and c...
I Tested LLM Prompt Caching With Anthropic and OpenAI
November 17, 2025
I spent $1.00 and a Saturday morning testing prompt caching with Anthropic and OpenAI. Here’s what actually happened when I measured cache hits, token counts, and real costs. The Setup Prompt caching lets you reuse parts of your LLM prompts across multiple API calls. Instead of the model reprocessing the same 10,000-token document every time, it caches the internal computation and retrieves it on ...
MCPB: One-Click Installation for MCP Servers
November 13, 2025
Anthropic released MCPB (MCP Bundles), a packaging format that lets you install MCP servers with a single click, similar to how Chrome extensions or VS Code plugins work. No more wrestling with config files or dependency management. It pruports to be a simple way to distribute local MCPs to users. I recently updated my writing-tools-mcp server to support the format, and the installation experience...
Governance in AI Agent Security
November 10, 2025
Two papers dropped in the last month that should make anyone deploying AI agents nervous. Not because they reveal new attacks, but because they prove our defenses don’t work. Simon Willison summarized both, but the governance implications deserve more attention. The Bad News “The Attacker Moves Second” from researchers at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind tested 12 published prompt injection ...
Resulting: Why Good Decisions Sometimes Look Bad
November 6, 2025
Annie Duke talks about a concept called “resulting” in her book Thinking in Bets: the tendency to judge decisions by their outcomes rather than their quality at the time they were made. It’s a useful shorthand for what psychologists have studied as outcome bias since the 1980s. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I think the problem isn’t just a matter of individual judgment errors, outco...
Recognition-Primed Decisions: Expert Intuition Under Pressure
November 3, 2025
We’ve explored how systematic frameworks like PDCA and the nursing decision cycle enable structured decision-making even under pressure. But what happens when there’s no time for even the most compressed systematic process? When decisions must be made in seconds, not minutes, based on pattern recognition rather than deliberate analysis? A firefighter rushes into a burning building, assesses the si...
Fall Reading List 2025
October 31, 2025
Fall has been a season of decision-making and risk for me, both in what I’ve been reading and thinking about. Following up on my summer reading list, here’s what’s been on rotation this fall. Unlike the summer’s eclectic mix of fish history and F1 engineering, this season had an unintentional theme: how smart people think about uncertainty, probability, and building things that last. Thinking in B...
The Nursing Decision Cycle: Clinical Judgment Under Pressure
October 27, 2025
Throughout this series on decision making structures, we’ve explored how different industries approach high-stakes decision making under uncertainty. We’ve seen, for example, how PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) provides a systematic framework for continuous improvement in manufacturing and nuclear operations. But what happens when there’s no time for deliberate planning cycles? When decisions must be mad...
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