All Posts

Azure Foundry, Zero Trust, and SASE for AI Agents

This post walks through a video session by enterprise architect Hallowell M. Longley, "Agentic AI Architecture" (youtu.be/IcEqtjrhyB0). It covers Microsoft Foundry, Zero Trust, and SASE, and how they fit together when you run AI agents at scale. The main idea is simple. The old security perimeter is mostly gone. Agents now run across many clouds, so you need one place to build and manage them, and one set of security rules that follows them. This post does not cover pricing, licensing, or setup steps. I checked the session's Foundry claims against Microsoft Learn

Foundry IQ: A Reference Guide

RAG has always had a dirty secret: it only searches one index at a time, and real questions never stay inside one index. Foundry IQ tries to fix that with a managed knowledge layer that plans, decomposes, and merges across sources. This is a reference guide to what it actually does, what it costs on two separate bills, and where the limits are still moving under you.

Agent Harness: Microsoft Has Four of Them, Not One

An AI agent isn't just a chatbot with more steps. The real difference is a control layer wrapped around the model. That layer decides what tools the agent can use, how much it remembers, when it needs to ask permission, and whether anyone can trace what it actually did. This layer is called the agent harness.

Benchmarking the Set-Based Rewrite at Production Volume

This final article puts the rewrite to a real test: production-scale volume, an actual Task Reviewer pass that catches something the earlier work missed, and a benchmark that settles whether the win holds up once the row count moves from a few hundred to over ten thousand.

Letting Four Agents Rewrite the Cursor

This article puts Hyper-Velocity Engineering to work on a complex rewrite: turning the RBAR cursor we described in the previous article, "Temporal Tables in a Real Database (Not a Toy Example)", into a single set-based query, without breaking the loader downstream.

Temporal Tables in a Real Database (Not a Toy Example)

WideWorldImporters ships with temporal tables that version themselves for free, no ETL code required. But there's a catch: the built-in syntax can tell you what a row looked like at any moment, and nothing about what changed since your last load. This article digs into that gap, and the two pieces of hand-written logic WideWorldImporters uses to bridge it.

How to Actually Adopt Hypervelocity Engineering (Without Buying the Whole Pitch)

Everyone's demoing Hypervelocity Engineering with 3x velocity numbers and a "30% of Microsoft's code is agent-written" line nobody can source. Here's what's actually underneath it: a four-agent workflow that won't let AI write code until it's done its homework, plus the install method most writeups get wrong (hint: it's not just VS Code).

Building Hosted AI Agents with GitHub Copilot CLI and Microsoft Foundry

Microsoft Open-Sourced Its Fix for AI Coding Agents That Skip Straight to Code

Eighty-eight percent of AI agent pilots never reach production. The usual explanation is governance. The real one is simpler: the model can't tell the difference between investigating a problem and solving it. Microsoft's own engineering framework names the fix, and it's not a smarter model. It's a narrower agent: block implementation during research, force every plan to cite its evidence, and never let context pile up silently across phases. Skip any one of those, and you get an agent that looks like it's following your process right up until it quietly isn't.

Notes on Simplicity

Simplicity isn't the absence of complexity. It's the result of understanding a problem well enough to solve it cleanly.

A Weekend with a Side Project

No stakeholders, no deadlines, no Jira tickets. Just you and a dumb idea that might turn into something.

Designing with Constraints

Limitations aren't obstacles to creativity. They're the structure that makes creativity possible.

Small Tools, Big Impact

The best developer tools do one thing well and get out of your way. A love letter to focused software.

Learning in Public

Writing about what you're learning is the fastest way to find out what you don't actually understand.

The Case for Static

Static sites aren't a step backwards. They're what you get when you take performance and simplicity seriously.

Building for the Long Term

The frameworks will change. The databases will change. What survives is the clarity of your thinking.