What we have learned building AI that has to keep working.
5 articles on Backend. — written by the people who ship and then maintain the systems.
Backend
Your Vector Database Is Not the Hard Part
Teams spend weeks choosing between vector stores, then lose months to chunking, metadata and relationships. The choice that matters is rarely the one debated.
13 August 2026 · 3 min read
Backend
Putting a Language Model Behind a Node.js API
Every assumption a Node service makes about its dependencies — fast, deterministic, cheap to retry — is wrong for a language model. What has to change.
11 August 2026 · 4 min read
Backend
Modelling a Knowledge Graph That Retrieval Can Actually Use
Most Graph RAG projects fail at the schema, not the query. Modelling every noun as a node produces a graph that is technically correct, expensive to maintain, and no better at answering questions than the search it replaced.
22 April 2026 · 3 min read
Backend
Replacing a System Nobody Can Turn Off
The rewrite that runs for two years and ships nothing is the default outcome, not the unlucky one. Replacing a working system means never having a day where the new one has to be finished.
5 November 2025 · 3 min read
Backend
The Checkout and the Classroom Are Not the Same System
Platforms that sell courses and deliver them get built as one application, because from the outside they look like one. Their correctness requirements are opposite, and the seam between them is where these products break.
14 October 2025 · 5 min read