Rick Hallett
Agentic systems engineer. Building verification infrastructure for human-AI collaboration, and learning in public about what that requires.
earth. lets stop the slop.
Recent
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2026-03-30
Building the Same System Three Times
A third implementation of the same shipping rate service — this time with 4 parallel workers gated by Sortie's multi-model adversarial review. Pre-merge quality gates caught security issues that 48 post-hoc reviews missed.
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2026-03-30
Building the Same System Twice
A take-home assessment. Two implementations. One took 18 hours with 48 adversarial reviews. The other took 1 hour with zero. Both work. What does that tell us?
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2026-03-10
The Agentic Engineering Bootcamp
A first-principles curriculum for SWEs who steer AI agents. Five bootcamps, 51 steps, 208-259 hours. From Linux primitives to evaluation pipelines.
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2026-02-28
Grounded thematic analysis: my voice vs. the machine's
I asked my agent to extract every verbatim thing I'd typed across 20 files in the repo, build a voice profile, then cross-analyse every blog post against it. Every post read like an agent wrote it and a human approved it.
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2026-02-20
The simple thing is the right thing
I asked my agent how to trigger a daily Vercel rebuild. It gave me deploy hooks, environment variables, logging scripts. I asked why.