Writing from The Cairo Companies

Glyphs are just notes somebody carved because it mattered.

Build logs, essays, The Rosetta, and podcasts from Cairo Labs, Cairo Consulting, and Cairo Networks. What we're building, how it actually works, and what we learned making it — written by the people who did the work.

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Showing all 36 posts

The AI That Knows Better Than You Do

My best result on a hard data problem came when I stopped giving orders and asked the AI to tell me what I was missing.

The AI That Knows How to Ask

When the AI isn't giving you what you want, stop tweaking the prompt and ask it how to improve what you're giving it.

The Silent Tax of Long Conversations

Long AI chats slow down and start forgetting because every prompt re-sends the whole history. Where the thresholds are, and when to start fresh.

The AI Strategy You’re Actually Missing

Which model to pay for is a distraction. The strategy that matters is execution and integration, with a human in the loop.

Hello from Cairo Labs

Why I'm sharing this publicly, who's writing it, and the one rule about AI you'll see in everything here.

I wrote 10,000 lines of code without writing a single line

Dozens of scripts, over ten thousand lines of working code and sixty thousand words of documentation, none of it typed by me. What changed when I stopped being the coder and became the architect.

Alex, After The Great Library at Alexandria

One front door over every place our knowledge lives, so nobody — human or agent — has to remember which system holds the answer.

The Bobs: What If the Consultants Were Actually Useful?

The Bobs: A panel of independent models that argue about your design before anyone builds it — and a synthesizer that turns the argument into a spec you can hand to a builder.

Getting Your Own Photographs Onto a Samsung Frame TV

The Frame's Art Mode is fussy in ways it never explains, and it fails silently when you get it wrong. Here's what it actually wants — and a free tool that handles it.

The TV That Would Only Talk to Its Neighbors

A segmented network, a Samsung Frame that refuses to pair across subnets, and a three-line NAT rule. A networking post from thirty years of doing this.

200,000 Photos, No Keywords, and No Intention of Typing Them In

I've been a photographer for forty years and my catalog was unsearchable. Photo Tagger runs a vision model on your own machine and fixes that without your work ever leaving the building.

Running an ML Engine on a GPU Its Own Toolkit Had Never Heard Of

The PTX technique that got ONNX Runtime and TensorRT onto Grace Blackwell ARM64 months before the toolchain supported it — now an MIT-licensed repo, in case it saves you a weekend.

How We Turn Three Chat Groups Into a Weekly Newsletter

The Rosetta is generated in-house on our own pipeline, from what our user groups are actually sharing. Here's the machinery, and why we didn't just point a model at the internet.

Plan With the Big Model, Build With the Fast One

A one-command change that puts your expensive thinking where thinking actually happens — plus the planning feature I wish I'd found sooner.

I Scaled Writing Code. Then I Had to Scale Finding Problems.

Automating the building half of software makes the finding-problems half the bottleneck. Here's what it looks like to point a second system at your own codebase overnight.

The QA Loop That Runs Without Me

When Claude Code finishes writing, Codex reviews it, Claude reads the findings and fixes them, and they go around again — up to five rounds before it stops and asks for me.

Standards Before Speed

I'm not a software engineer, and I've built a lot of software. The thing that made the difference wasn't better prompts — it was writing down the rules once so I'd stop repeating them.

Make Backups. Offsite. Air-Gapped. I'll Keep Saying It.

Replit's agent deleted a customer's production database during a code freeze, then told him recovery was impossible. It was wrong about that too. The lesson isn't about that agent - it's about what your agents are allowed to reach.

Naturally, I Called It the TPS Report

A day and a half of building bought me a single page that answers "what is my AI pipeline actually doing right now" — and it changed how I work.

What I've Learned Picking Local Models

The bigger model isn't always the better model, the benchmark won't tell you which one fits your job, and the only test that counts is the one you run on your own work.

Skills or MCP? A Two-Layer Rule That Settles It

If the knowledge is timeless, it goes in a markdown skill. If it needs a live connection, it goes through MCP. One sentence that resolves most of the confusion.

The Backup That Saved My Skin

An AI told me a deletion was safe. It wasn't. The backup I built before anything else had 481 sessions of history back the same morning.

Sometimes Many Small Agents Equal One Large Agent

AT&T cut AI costs 90% by replacing big agents with a network of small ones. The same logic is why my planning tier runs on models small enough to sit on my desk.

Which AI Should Review Your AI's Code?

I ran three phases of Claude Code's output past several reviewer models and kept score. Here's the configuration I settled on, and why one reviewer gets you most of the way.

How to Use AI to Explore a Market You Know Nothing About

A client wanted the top vendors in a market we had never worked in. Three AI models, eighteen research reports, and a human reading every stage - here is the workflow, and why the humans were the long pole.

I Don't Know Linux. I Built a Linux AI Server Anyway.

Phase 1 of standing up an NVIDIA DGX Spark — monitoring, logging, backups, and the agent that builds things — by someone who has always detested Linux.

Don't Avoid NaaS. Embrace It.

Network-as-a-Service is doing to networking what the cloud did to storage and compute. A network engineer's case for why that is an opportunity rather than a threat.

Say Goodbye to Network Trouble Tickets

Enterprise networks sit around 90-95% reliability. Getting past that isn't more of the same effort - it means removing the causes of tickets rather than resolving them faster.