Most of my work sits at the same seam: a model that is confident, and a system that has to be correct. The interesting engineering is almost never the prompt. It is the budget cap, the approval gate, the audit log, the fallback path, and knowing which parts of the problem the model should not be touching at all.
A few things I keep coming back to:
- Let the model translate, not compute. In
calpt, an LLM turns English into a command and SymPy does every piece of arithmetic — because a language model that is 97% right about calculus is a language model that is wrong in a way you will not notice. - Autonomy needs brakes before it needs features.
trentruns multi-agent workflows behind hard spend caps, an approval queue, a kill switch, and a tamper-evident hash chain over every state change. - Say what is actually proven. trent's README opens with a status table that says Not-yet-wired in three places, next to the exact command that would prove otherwise.
Ten small, sharp defensive tools, each rebuilt to one standard — shared rich
CLI, hardened network surfaces, safe-by-default flags, 275 tests passing
across the set. Built to make the right thing easy and the wrong thing hard.
byte-bouncer · phish-pond · lantern-lan · threat-tea · key-kettle · caesar-salad · floodlight · lockbox-lane · sentry-sundae · patch-peeker
