The Autonomous Paradox In 2026, we’ve moved past simple chatbots. We are building Production-Grade RAG pipelines and autonomous agents that can plan, execute, and iterate. But as an architect, I’ve noticed a glaring hole in our "Agentic" future: Identity Sprawl. We are giving agents non-human identities (NHI) with "Full Admin" permissions just to ensure the RAG works smoothly. We are effectively
What if your Kubernetes cluster simply refused to run unsigned images? I spent some time experimenting with enforcing image provenance in a small Kubernetes setup using MicroK8s. The idea was simple: Only container images with valid cryptographic signatures are allowed to run in the cluster. For this I used: GitLab CI/CD (build + signing pipeline) Cosign / Sigstore (image signing) Kyverno (admissi
If you have ever run DESCRIBE HISTORY on a Delta table that receives streaming data every 60 seconds and watched it either hang for hours or crash with an OutOfMemoryError, you are not alone and you are not doing anything wrong. The problem is architectural, and once you understand the internals, the fix becomes a lot clearer. Here is what I learned after digging into why this happens and what you
I shipped gni-compression to npm two days ago. One of the first questions I got (from myself, running benchmarks at midnight): does it work on anything other than chat data? Short answer: not yet. Long answer: I found out exactly why, and it led me somewhere more interesting than I expected. After the npm launch I ran GN against Silesia — the standard general text compression benchmark suite. Dick
Introduction Picture two doctors updating the same patient record at the same time - one in São Paulo, the other in London. Both are offline. When connectivity returns, whose changes prevail? This is not a hypothetical. It is the everyday reality of distributed systems: multiple nodes, no shared clock, no guaranteed network. The conventional answer has long been locking - one node waits while an
I keep seeing the same argument about AI making us dumber. It's the same argument people had about search engines, and before that books. The usual response is to point at history and say "every generation panics, every generation was wrong, relax." I think that response is half right, and the wrong half is what bothers me. Tools change what we bother to remember. The people who'd trained their wh
Most teams I have worked with have one auth test in their suite. It looks like this: test('valid token verifies', () => { const token = signSync({ sub: 'user-1', aud: 'api://backend' }, secret); const result = verify(token, options); expect(result.valid).toBe(true); }); That test is fine. It is also a smoke test, not a regression suite. It catches the case where verification is completely b
The on-call alert at 02:14 said auth_5xx_rate spiked from 0.01 to 31.4. Not a deploy window. Not a traffic spike. Just thirty-one percent of authenticated requests failing for ~four minutes, then back to baseline. The cause was a JWKS rotation on the issuer side. New keys came in. Old keys went out. Caches in our service didn't refresh fast enough. Tokens signed with the new key were rejected beca