Search
Start AI Tools with Intent Solutions
The implementation journal of Intent Solutions. Follow the work of turning AI capability into reliable production systems: the builds, evaluations, failures, and operating lessons your team can use for itself.
Curated long reads
Let the Model Judge. Make the Code Decide.
The model owns judgment. Deterministic code owns the gates, the commit, and the audit trail. How I rebuilt a daily writing pipeline so a hung session can no longer brick tomorrow.
Adversarial Review: The Six Lenses That Halted a Rollout
Six lenses, live state, eighteen risks. I thought the safety work was shipped. The review proved three assumptions were theater. The durable rule: the model proposes; the system owns identity, trust, and state.
The Moat Is the Trust Layer
A local-RAG demo became Intent NEXUS. The moat is not the chatbot. It is egress control, code-enforced citations, a ledger you can check, injection defense, and evals that cannot lie quietly to you.
Recent posts
Docker Container Security Hardening: What Unit Tests Miss
Docker container security hardening, from one staging deploy. Five controls that passed their own tests, and the review question behind each.
ReadTwo releases in four minutes: why release.yml fires twice
Why startaitools saw v1.33.31 and v1.33.32 land four minutes apart: the post+assets cadence is two pushes to master, so release.yml stamps each one.
ReadBash 2>/dev/null Hides stderr, Not the Exit Code
Bash 2>/dev/null hides the message but not the exit code. Under set -euo pipefail, the suppressed exit still aborts a substitution, killing first deploys.
ReadTag a Tested SHA, Not a Bot Commit
A bot push on a protected branch wedges a CI release in a tag-already-exists loop. Move the version bump into a PR and tag an already-CI-green SHA on main.
ReadMove the deploy runner onto the tailnet, skip Tailscale OIDC
Move the GitHub Actions deploy runner onto the tailnet, skip the ephemeral Tailscale OIDC handshake. Add join-tailnet and send-revision toggles.
ReadWhen a Third-Party CI Credential Expires, the Deploy Fallback Has to Already Live on the VPS
A VPS-resident deploy script plus a SHA-pin guard turns any third-party CI credential expiry into a one-line SSH recovery.
ReadWhen git describe Traps Your CI Semver Bump, Look Up the Highest Existing Tag Instead
A bot's [skip ci] version-bump commit that was rejected by branch protection creates an annotated tag outside the branch's ancestry. git describe keeps returning the older reachable tag, the bump recomputes a version that was already tagged, and the release job fails with `tag already exists` on every push. Use `git tag --list 'v*' --sort=-v:refname | head -n1` (highest existing tag, not git describe) and the version stays monotonic forever.
ReadSeries & curriculum
MCP for Beginners
End-to-end Model Context Protocol curriculum — solutions in Python, TypeScript, Java, Rust, C#, .NET — translated across six languages.
Agentic Design Patterns
Patterns and anti-patterns for production agent systems. Decision frameworks, prompt scaffolds, evaluation harnesses.
Tiny Recursive Models
Building small recursive systems where simple loops compose into emergent behavior. Series in progress.
Research & Curriculum
Long-form research articles, learning paths, and reading lists for the AI builder community.
Retrospectives
August 2026: A Control That Fires on Every Case and Changes No Outcome Is a Log Line
A control that fires on every case and changes no outcome is a log line, not a control. August 2026 retrospective: 31 of 31 posts flagged for inflation with the distribution unmoved, a learned cap rule that caught zero, and a rubric six weeks stale that still names a retired rule.
July 2026July 2026: Every Instrument Reported Success, and One of the Published Posts Was a 404
July 2026 retrospective: Tier 1 collapsed from 46% to 17%, the anti-inflation rule adopted July 3 fired zero times all month, the grader demoted half the catalog on a title keyword list, and a post with a full green audit trail was never published at all.
Let's build something that ships to production
Intent Solutions is an applied AI engineering company. We build with your team, test against your actual work, and transfer the knowledge needed to operate and evolve the system. This journal shares the methods and lessons that can be made public.
No commitment required. We respond within 24 hours.