Back to M2DE 7 volumes · Perranporth

The Shelf

Things I've written. Pull one out.

My AI Engineering Journey JUL ’26 14 JUL 2026 Retrospective My AI Engineering Journey

Five glowing terminal windows linked left to right, each a different colour, the last bursting into dashed lines.

Looking back, this wasn't really a sequence of tools. It was a sequence of bottlenecks. 14 JULY 2026 · MARCO MARK

Stop Calling It a Harness JUL ’26 13 JUL 2026 Opinion Stop Calling It a Harness

Five stacked labelled layers on a blueprint grid, reading model, harness, agent, context and workflow, with workflow highlighted.

The word harness has swallowed the whole agentic stack. Here is a cleaner five-layer model. 13 JULY 2026 · MARCO MARK

Spaghettification JUN ’26 18 JUN 2026 Opinion Spaghettification

A black hole ringed by a glowing orange accretion disc against a violet starfield.

A black hole is any gap in what your AI agent can see or verify. Fall into one and it improvises. 18 JUNE 2026 · MARCO MARK

Mister Circus APR ’26 13 APR 2026 Family Mister Circus

A vintage circus poster reading Zirkus Otto Mark, Mister Circus, above a big top tent at dusk.

Otto Mark of Grevenbroich-Kapellen. Master logistics coordinator. They called him Mister Circus. 13 APRIL 2026 · MARCO MARK

The Engineer That Was MAR ’26 13 MAR 2026 Reflection The Engineer That Was

A sepia polaroid of an old desktop computer, captioned The Engineer That Was, resting on an album page.

A year without writing code. How everything changed, and how quickly it started feeling normal. 13 MARCH 2026 · MARCO MARK

FIGHT THE FRAMEWORK MAR ’26 11 MAR 2026 Opinion FIGHT THE FRAMEWORK

A pixel-art arcade versus screen pitting a Developer against a Framework between two cabinets.

Full-stack frameworks blur client and server. AI loves that about as much as implicit conventions. 11 MARCH 2026 · MARCO MARK

2026: THE YEAR OF CLI TOOLS MAR ’26 6 MAR 2026 Opinion 2026: The Year of CLI Tools

A glowing amber CRT monitor in a dark room, showing a shell prompt.

The terminal is making a comeback. AI figured out what developers always knew. 6 MARCH 2026 · MARCO MARK

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