From RAG to Agentic Workflows · Part 1/12Article3 min read
LLM Fundamentals in C#
A supplied judgment can be summarized only from passages you pass in. The same client, with no passage, names a citation that the catalog rejects.
Writing
Technical articles and perspectives on software engineering, applied AI, financial technology, and the way teams build systems.
Applied AI
Agents, retrieval, and AI systems built for real engineering work.
From RAG to Agentic Workflows · Part 2/12Article2 min read
Simple RAG over Indian Court Judgments
Chunk a versioned judgment manifest, embed it locally, and return the passage with its character offsets.
From RAG to Agentic Workflows · Part 3/12Article2 min read
Advanced Legal Retrieval
Keyword, hashing-vector, and hybrid search on the same question, plus the SQL a pgvector store would run.
From RAG to Agentic Workflows · Part 4/12Article2 min read
Function Calling and Legal Research Tools
Deterministic C# tools for case metadata, passages, and a short constitutional catalog, with rejected blank input.
From RAG to Agentic Workflows · Part 5/12Article2 min read
An MCP Server in C#
A JSON-RPC handler exposes five read-only research tools and refuses any tool name outside that list.
From RAG to Agentic Workflows · Part 6/12Article2 min read
A Bounded Legal Research Agent
A tool loop with a call limit and a timeout that refuses outcome predictions and cites only retrieved passages.
From RAG to Agentic Workflows · Part 7/12Article2 min read
Agentic RAG and Precedent Research
Decompose a privacy question, keep a human-review flag, and do not treat a citation string as an overruling.
From RAG to Agentic Workflows · Part 8/12Article1 min read
A Multi-Agent Legal Research Workflow
Discovery, analysis, verification, and the report share one typed state and can resume after a stop.
From RAG to Agentic Workflows · Part 9/12Article2 min read
Event-Driven Judgment Ingestion
A local queue retries extraction, dead-letters repeated failures, and skips a job id that already completed.
From RAG to Agentic Workflows · Part 10/12Article1 min read
Agent Memory and Durable Execution
Save the research checkpoint separately from any chat transcript, then delete it.
From RAG to Agentic Workflows · Part 11/12Article1 min read
Evaluation, Security, and Reliability
Fixed checks for retrieval, unknown citations, hidden instructions in a judgment, and tools that are not allowed.
From RAG to Agentic Workflows · Part 12/12Article2 min read
A Local Legal Research Application
The ASP.NET Core API and Blazor UI that search the sample, run the workflow, and expose a health check.
Applied AIArticle6 min read
The LLM Should Not Own Portfolio Risk
Bedrock for language and tool selection; C# for allocations, HHI, and stress. IAM, Guardrails, and IChatClient as separate layers — not a chat wrapper.
Applied AIArticle9 min read
Your AI Coding Assistant Shouldn't Be Your Company's Knowledge Layer
Why does every AI coding assistant rediscover how your company works? A platform-engineering build guide for financial services on Context as a Service — enterprise context plane, MCP gateway, and organizational truth plus local branch context for Cursor, Copilot, and Claude Code.
Applied AIArticle11 min read
AI-DLC Is Just Structured Prompts — What I Learned Trying AWS Labs aidlc-workflows
AI-DLC is structured prompts in .cursor/rules — but audit.md and aidlc-state.md are the real wins. A credible AI strategy for teams that do not want to build MCP servers, custom agents, or workflow orchestration from scratch.
Applied AIArticle8 min read
Embeddings and Vector Databases: The Search Layer Behind Real AI Applications
Embeddings convert meaning into vectors; vector databases make those vectors searchable. Together they form the retrieval foundation behind RAG, semantic search, and enterprise AI assistants.
Applied AIArticle8 min read
RAG vs Graph RAG vs Agentic RAG: How to Choose the Right Architecture
Standard RAG, Graph RAG, and Agentic RAG all connect LLMs to private data — but they solve different problems. Match the architecture to the question: retrieval, relationships, or reasoning.
Applied AIArticle4 min read
Model Context Protocol Tools, Resources, and Prompts Explained
Understand MCP tools, resources, and prompts with practical examples for AI agents, enterprise workflows, and developer productivity.
Applied AIArticle3 min read
Can ChatGPT MCP Connectors Use Resources and Prompts or Only Tools?
A practical explanation of what MCP connectors expose to AI clients: tools, resources, prompts, and how to think about capability support.
Applied AIArticle3 min read
MCP Resources Explained with Practical Examples
Learn what MCP resources are, how they differ from tools, and how to use them for logs, portfolios, documents, APIs, and enterprise AI workflows.
Applied AIArticle3 min read
MCP Prompts Explained: When to Use Prompts vs Tools vs Resources
Understand MCP prompts, reusable AI workflow templates, and how they differ from tools and resources in Model Context Protocol servers.
Applied AIArticle3 min read
Deploying MCP Servers: Stdio, HTTP, and Approval Gates
Platform engineering guide to MCP transport choice — stdio for Cursor, HTTP for production containers — plus human-in-the-loop approval before state-changing tools.
Applied AIArticle3 min read
MCP Tools, Resources, and Prompts in C#: A Hands-On Tutorial
Hands-on C# patterns for enterprise MCP servers — support ticket tools, customer profile resource URIs, documentation prompts, and contract testing with platform-domain examples.
Applied AIArticle3 min read
Building Your First MCP Server in C# and .NET
Tutorial: expose product catalog search to AI hosts with the ModelContextProtocol NuGet package — compare manual HTTP integration vs MCP tools using enterprise domain models and Cursor setup.
Applied AIArticle10 min read
From AI Model Consumer to AI Application Builder
A practical guide for .NET engineers moving from chat prompts to RAG, MCP servers, agents, and agentic workflows — with security patterns, architecture diagrams, and platform mental models.
Applied AI4 min read
Private RAG Systems Without External APIs
Mid-sized teams can build secure, self-hosted AI assistants with open-source models, vector stores, and RAG — without routing proprietary data through third-party APIs.
Applied AI3 min read
AI That Reduces Friction Before You Press Call
Before you dial a customer care number, Google Phone already analyzed the business, estimated wait time, and surfaced busy-hour patterns — practical AI embedded in everyday workflows.
Financial Technology
Markets, risk, and investing in the United States and India.
Financial TechnologyArticle4 min read
What Is the 3-5-7 Rule in Trading?
Learn the 3-5-7 rule in trading as a simple risk management framework for position sizing, portfolio exposure, and avoiding concentrated losses.
Financial TechnologyArticle2 min read
Building Finance MCP Servers
Finance-specific MCP patterns — equity search, portfolio resources, order tools with approval gates, and audit-friendly error handling for regulated workloads.
Financial Technology3 min read
The 3-5-7 Rule: A Trader's Discipline Framework
90% of traders focus on picking stocks; 10% focus on protecting capital. A simple framework: 3% risk per trade, 5% portfolio drawdown cap, 7:1 profit-to-loss ratio.
Financial Technology2 min read
The 50-30-20 Rule: Budgeting for Busy Professionals
A timeless budgeting framework: 50% needs, 30% wants, 20% savings and investments. Consistency beats complexity.
Financial Technology3 min read
Know When to Fold
The most expensive words in investing: "I should at least get my money back." When a stock drops 50%, it must double just to break even.
Financial Technology3 min read
How Survivorship Bias Lies to You
Everyone quotes Apple, Tesla, and Infosys — but for every multi-bagger, dozens quietly disappeared. Over 70% of U.S. listed companies from 1980 no longer exist.
Financial Technology3 min read
AWS Outage: Downtime for Tech, Signal for Investors
A 12-hour AWS outage created a new data point for traders — revealing single-provider dependency and which companies engineer redundancy.
Financial Technology3 min read
The Art of Letting Profits Go on Your Terms
Most investors plan stop-losses but not profit-taking. A sell-limit order captures gains automatically — decide your exit before the market decides for you.
Financial Technology3 min read
When One Stock Becomes the Market
NVIDIA crossed $5 trillion — roughly 8% of the S&P 500. Index funds are becoming more concentrated in a few names, whether investors intend it or not.
Financial Technology3 min read
Invest in Goals, Not Headlines
Savvy investors invest to reach goals — buying a home, funding education, retirement. Purpose brings patience; every rupee or dollar links to a destination.
Financial Technology4 min read
When Flights Stop, Portfolios Shift Gears
Flight disruptions rearrange demand across industries — car rentals, cruise lines, energy, and regional tourism benefit while aviation slows.
Financial Technology2 min read
Patience in Volatile Markets
Geopolitical uncertainty widens short-term outcomes. Edge comes from patience, disciplined risk management, and waiting for clean setups — not every headline deserves a reaction.
Financial Technology2 min read
In the Midst of Chaos, There Is Opportunity
Periods of geopolitical tension create the largest price dislocations. The edge is not predicting every move — it is preparation and risk management.
Financial Technology3 min read
Consistent Execution in a Messy Quarter
Q1 2026 was brutal for indices — S&P -6.53%, Nasdaq -9.26%. A disciplined trading process delivered +8.13% through shorter holds, fast profit booking, and sitting in cash when there was no edge.
Financial Technology3 min read
When the Market Rewards a Narrative
Allbirds pivoted to AI and its market cap jumped 7x in 24 hours — with no product launch. We've seen this pattern before: dot-com, blockchain, now AI.
Financial Technology2 min read
The Most Profitable Players Fold a Lot
Poker teaches that real edge is knowing when not to buy. Fewer trades, better entries, patience over FOMO — markets reward the same discipline.
Financial Technology3 min read
History Repeats — Great Technology Doesn't Equal Great Investment
Dot-com, housing boom, AI excitement, SpaceX IPO — technology can reshape decades, but great technology does not automatically equal a great investment at any price.
Cloud & Distributed Systems
Kubernetes, AWS, and the infrastructure software runs on.
Cloud & Distributed SystemsArticle11 min read
We Moved Computing to the Cloud. Could AI Bring It Back?
New local AI computers are powerful enough to share across a team. Here is when owning that capacity can make sense, when the cloud still should, and the managed-infrastructure business in between.
Kubernetes Series · Part 1/17Article7 min read
What Is Kubernetes? A Simple Explanation for Software Engineers
A practical, no-fluff explanation of Kubernetes for software engineers — what problem it solves, how Pods, Nodes, and the control plane work, with finance, C#, and AWS examples.
Kubernetes Series · Part 2/17Article4 min read
Docker vs Kubernetes: What's the Difference?
Docker packages one container; Kubernetes runs many across machines. A clear, practical explanation of how they fit together, with finance, C#, and AWS examples.
Kubernetes Series · Part 3/17Article4 min read
Understanding Pods, Deployments, and Services in Kubernetes
The three Kubernetes objects you touch every day — Pods, Deployments, and Services — explained clearly with finance, C#, and AWS examples.
Kubernetes Series · Part 4/17Article5 min read
What Happens When You Run kubectl apply?
Trace one kubectl apply command through the API server, etcd, controllers, scheduler, and kubelet — so debugging becomes a step-by-step checklist.
Kubernetes Series · Part 5/17Article5 min read
Kubernetes Architecture Explained Like an Airport
A memorable mental model for Kubernetes architecture: the control plane is the tower, Nodes are runways. Understand every component and how they fail.
Kubernetes Series · Part 6/17Article4 min read
How Kubernetes Keeps Applications Running
How Kubernetes self-heals: the reconciliation loop plus liveness and readiness probes keep your services alive without paging anyone. With C# and AWS examples.
Kubernetes Series · Part 7/17Article4 min read
Kubernetes Networking Explained for Developers
How traffic reaches your Pods: Services, ClusterIP, Ingress, and cluster DNS explained without the iptables deep-dive. With finance, C#, and AWS examples.
Kubernetes Series · Part 8/17Article4 min read
Kubernetes Storage Explained: Volumes, PVs, and PVCs
Pods are disposable, so how does data survive? PersistentVolumes, PersistentVolumeClaims, StorageClasses, and StatefulSets explained, with EBS/EFS examples.
Kubernetes Series · Part 9/17Article4 min read
What Is Helm and Why Kubernetes Needed a Package Manager?
Helm is the package manager for Kubernetes. Learn what charts, values, and releases are, and why they tame YAML sprawl across environments.
Kubernetes Series · Part 10/17Article4 min read
Helm Charts Explained for Developers
The anatomy of a Helm chart — Chart.yaml, values.yaml, and templates — with a practical .NET service example you can actually ship to EKS.
Kubernetes Series · Part 11/17Article4 min read
Amazon EKS Explained for .NET Developers
Managed Kubernetes on AWS for .NET engineers — how EKS, ECR, IRSA, load balancers, and Secrets Manager map to the Kubernetes concepts you already know.
Kubernetes Series · Part 12/17Article4 min read
ECS vs EKS: Which AWS Container Service Should You Use?
A clear decision framework for ECS vs EKS — simplicity versus the Kubernetes ecosystem — so you pick the right AWS container service instead of defaulting to one.
Kubernetes Series · Part 13/17Article4 min read
CrashLoopBackOff Explained: How to Debug It
What CrashLoopBackOff means and a fast, repeatable routine to debug it — logs, events, exit codes, config, and probes — with C# and AWS examples.
Kubernetes Series · Part 14/17Article4 min read
Why Pods Get Stuck in Pending (and How to Fix It)
A Pending Pod is a scheduling problem, not an app crash. Learn the causes — capacity, taints, unbound PVCs, affinity — and how to fix each on EKS.
Kubernetes Series · Part 15/17Article4 min read
Kubernetes Concepts Every Staff Engineer Should Understand
Beyond YAML: the reconciliation model, resource requests, failure design, security, scaling, and cost trade-offs that staff engineers are expected to reason about.
Kubernetes Series · Part 16/17Article4 min read
Running MCP Servers on Kubernetes
An MCP server is just an HTTP service — run it on Kubernetes as a Deployment and Service with probes, autoscaling, and Secrets Manager. The MCP-specific decisions explained.
Kubernetes Series · Part 17/17Article5 min read
How AI Agents Run on Kubernetes
AI agents run on Kubernetes as ordinary workloads — Deployments, Services, HPAs — plus queues for long jobs and GPU nodes for self-hosted models. With finance examples.
Leadership & Perspectives
Teams, decisions, and how an organization actually works.
Leadership & PerspectivesArticle8 min read
5 Tips to Drive Innovation in an Organization
How to move past "that's not how we do it here" — reinvent processes, share business problems openly, make failure acceptable, balance accountability with experimentation, and keep an open mind for ideas from anywhere.
Leadership & PerspectivesArticle6 min read
Top 4 Indicators for Sunsetting a Product
When stakeholders fall in love with a legacy product, sunsetting becomes emotional — but the best product leaders know when to pull the plug using cost, customer satisfaction, technology age, and market fit.
Leadership & PerspectivesArticle5 min read
Cultivating an Agile Mindset
Following Scrum ceremonies without an agile mindset is a car without an engine. Focus on sprint goals, fail-fast culture, and retrospectives that actually change behavior.
Leadership & PerspectivesArticle5 min read
How Software Engineering Teams Should Look in the AI Era
The traditional model repeats the same roles across siloed domain teams. The AI-era model connects specialized squads through an Efficiency Team building shared MCPs, RAG pipelines, agents, and agentic workflows.
Leadership & Perspectives2 min read
What Makes a Literate Software Engineer
Literacy in software engineering is not just writing code — it is reading others' code, debugging, and explaining logic in natural language.
Leadership & Perspectives3 min read
Small Teams, Clear Vision, Big Outcomes
Twitter's engineering team cut code from 700k to 70k lines, moved infrastructure on-prem, and reduced bills by 60% — proof that a small motivated team with clear direction can solve complex problems.