None of it finished
Lab
Not products, not tutorials. Each entry is a question I'm chasing, what I'm doing about it, and where it stands today.
01The real cost of a token
The question
What does one LLM request cost end to end once caching, batching, retries and latency are all counted?
What I'm doing about it
Instrument every call, then build a back-of-envelope model I can argue with.
Open question · Since · #infra #cost
02MCP, from the server side
The question
Where is the Model Context Protocol genuinely elegant, and where does it leak?
What I'm doing about it
Writing small servers that expose real tools and resources, then watching how different clients treat them.
Building · Since · #mcp #protocols
03Agents that fail well
The question
What should an agent do when it is unsure, stuck, or wrong, and how does the system around it find out?
What I'm doing about it
Tool-call loops with explicit budgets, checkpoints and a human escape hatch. Collecting failure modes as I hit them.
Open question · Since · #agents #reliability
04RAG, evals first
The question
Can I write the test set before the retriever, and let it decide the architecture?
What I'm doing about it
Hand-labelled questions, retrieval metrics before generation quality, chunking treated as an experiment instead of a default.
Open question · Since · #rag #evals
05How small is small enough?
The question
Which of my everyday tasks could a small local model do well enough that I stop calling the big one?
What I'm doing about it
Log what I actually ask for a week, then replay it against smaller models. Waiting on free time.
Parked · Since · #local #models