Steven Poitras’s living context

Ask what I’ve learned building with AI, or plug it into your own agent.

Gathering the learnings…

The map needs JavaScript. Every learning is also on the blog, and agents can read llms.txt.

Why I Went Back to Nutanix
Not Cairn
Rivals Enter Your Critical Path
We Measured the Wrong Noun
The Fence It Wrote for Itself
Name What the Agent Must Not Be
The Critic Said No
Chosen, Not Assigned
Grade the Answer, Not the Shape
Describe When, Not What
The Gotchas Are Load-Bearing
Recursion That Can't Run Away
The Loop Is a Ledger, Not an Orchestrator
The Files Are the Memory
Agents Will Lie to Escape the Loop
Loop on the Gap, Not the Try-Count
A Field Guide to Agent Loops
The Agent Is a While Loop
Proven End to End
The Clean Room
Confidence Is Not Consent
Bind the Goal, Not the Gesture
Instructions That Outlive the Model
Bound, Don't Script
Externalize the Knowledge
MCP as Discovery Protocol
MCP Isn't the Problem
The Interface Forecast
Democratizing AI Builders
Negotiated Integrations
Headless AI: Every App Is a Head
MCP: The Semantic Data Layer
The AI Dev Toolkit in 2026
What is Agentic Thinking?
Interfaces Are Changing
Rules That Know Your Stack
Ema Workflows: Routing and Branching
Your Rules Are Fighting Each Other
Ema Workflows: Entity Extraction
Search: From 30ms to 3 Seconds
AI That Teaches Itself
Subagents: Fresh Eyes on Demand
Compiler vs LLM: A Deep Dive
Testing AI Artifacts: A Validation Framework
The alwaysApply Tax
Audit Your AI Config
Rules vs Skills in AI Dev
How Cursor Finds Skills
The Three-Tier Context System
Building This Blog's Search
Commands That Know When to Merge
Compiler to LLM Workflows
Smart Routing: Right Agent, Right Job
Designing with the Persona Lens Model
Anatomy of a Persona Lens
Search is Dead. Long Live Action.
Designing Agent Personas That Actually Work
.ctx: Memory for Amnesiac Agents
The Multi-Agent Illusion
Intent: From Keywords to LLMs
Beyond Rules: Commands, Agents, and Skills
MCP Tools People Actually Use
Embeddings: How Vectors Get Meaning
Goals Matter More Than Code
Rules on Rules on Rules
Ema Workflows: RAG Flow Control
Rules, Agents, Commands, MCP... WTF?
Inline LLM Calls: Skip the Redeploy
MCP: From Hardcoded to Live Data
The MCP Mental Model
MCP in Practice: Knowledge-First Builder
MCP in Practice: From Scripts to Platform
The New Hire Who Never Sleeps
Agentic AI: Beyond the Chatbot
Why I Joined Ema: Betting on Agentic AI
Ema Platform: Agentic AI Guide
Ema: The Universal AI Employee Platform
Ema's Founders: Google to Startup
About Me: Consulting to Startups