The Discipline Nobody Teaches Every engineer I know is tracking the wrong thing. Lines of code shipped. Features deployed. Model latency shaved by another 12 milliseconds. These are easy to measure, which is probably why we measure them. But the skill that actually separates good AI engineers from great ones is almost impossible to put…
Assumption Debt: The Silent Killer of AI Products Most AI products don’t fail because the model was bad. They fail because the team spent six months optimizing for the wrong thing, and by the time anyone noticed, the cost of changing course felt unbearable. I’ve watched this happen repeatedly, and I’ve done it myself. The…
Harvard’s ML Systems Curriculum Is Free Now. Here’s What That Actually Means. Prof. Vijay Janapa Reddi just open-sourced the entire Harvard CS249r ML Systems course. The textbook is on GitHub. The curriculum is public. The thing that costs tens of thousands of dollars per credit hour to sit near in Cambridge, Massachusetts is now free…
