Operator notes from Adam Hevenor.https://hevmind.com/https://hevmind.com/writing/openai-makes-four/https://hevmind.com/writing/openai-makes-four/OpenAI's Decisions API (gpt-6-luna, public beta) as a BEIR reranker: 0.472 mean nDCG@10 in its best shape, behind Jev and Perplexity at 0.501, with peaked probabilities that break the 0.1 prune.Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/jev-has-company/https://hevmind.com/writing/jev-has-company/Jev, Clef-flash and Perplexity's pplx-decider as BEIR rerankers: Perplexity's choice shape edges Jev on quality and price, Jev is faster and scores each document, and Clef-flash needs one call per document.Sun, 04 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/jev-as-a-reranker/https://hevmind.com/writing/jev-as-a-reranker/Building your own SOTA reranker is now highly achievable. I pointed TypeSafe's new structured-output model at three BEIR datasets, untuned, and it landed next to the purpose-built rerankers on quality, price, and latency.Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/how-to-choose-a-vector-database/https://hevmind.com/writing/how-to-choose-a-vector-database/Talk abstract. Reading the vector pricing calculators, linking features to outcomes, and what else decides it anyway — existing search systems, AWS credits, and how fast your data grows.Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/dope-tech-topk/https://hevmind.com/writing/dope-tech-topk/First entry in a series on the search tech I actually reach for. TopK gets the 2026 architecture right — multi-vector late interaction, object-store-native plus NVMe, LSN read-after-write consistency, and Postgres-compatible SQL. Not enterprise-ready yet, and I say where.Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/a-new-role-for-swe-managing-outcomes-not-outputs/https://hevmind.com/writing/a-new-role-for-swe-managing-outcomes-not-outputs/I haven't reviewed a line of code in over a decade — not because I can't read it, but because I learned in 2008 that trust comes from outcomes, not from meddling in output. That's the same lesson every engineer handing work to an agent is about to learn.Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/competing-as-a-privateer-in-the-ai-race/https://hevmind.com/writing/competing-as-a-privateer-in-the-ai-race/Racing is the ultimate expression of engineering, and the privateers — people building their own agent harnesses and competing at the frontier — are where the real innovation in AI is happening in 2026. A field guide, from F1 and downhill MTB to Geoffrey Huntley, OpenClaw, and Pi.Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/cheating-at-search-for-astro-docs/https://hevmind.com/writing/cheating-at-search-for-astro-docs/Doug Turnbull's Cheat at Search course inspired me to build hev ask — agentic Q&A search for Astro docs sites. No vector DB, a committed digest Claude builds offline, and a constrained four-tool-call agent loop at query time.Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/hev-find-agentic-search-for-astro/https://hevmind.com/writing/hev-find-agentic-search-for-astro/A ⌘K search overlay that's keyword-instant while you type and turns into a bounded agent when you press Enter. Build-time knowledge graph by Opus, anchor-deep results, Haiku in the loop. Still under development, open source.Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/new-site-who-dis/https://hevmind.com/writing/new-site-who-dis/Twenty years of web presence, from a hand-organized folder of files to WordPress to no home at all — and back to a folder of files. This time the files are good.Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/state-of-agentic-engineering-building-a-cli-for-turbopuffer/https://hevmind.com/writing/state-of-agentic-engineering-building-a-cli-for-turbopuffer/turbopuffer wins the price-performance math but left me asking "now what?" every time I loaded data into it, so I built tpuff — namespace browsing, scans, schema management. Porting it from TypeScript to Go, and what a standard harness could and couldn't one-shot in April 2026.Fri, 17 Apr 2026 15:09:41 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/harnessing-agentic-search/https://hevmind.com/writing/harnessing-agentic-search/Search is the fuel for agent context, so solving search for your agent is often the difference between succeeding and failing at a task. Claude Code swapped vector RAG for grep and let the model search for itself; I wanted to try that against Reddit, which is a genuinely gnarly search problem. The result is hiveminer.Sun, 01 Mar 2026 13:49:10 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/the-end-of-vibecheck-developer-preview-and-the-start-of-something-more-ambitious/https://hevmind.com/writing/the-end-of-vibecheck-developer-preview-and-the-start-of-something-more-ambitious/I shut the vibecheck developer preview down over the break — I ran out of GCP credits for the database instance. A scatterbrained account of the road there: v0 with my kid, real client work in Cursor after ten years away from code, some painful lab interviews, a DSL built with Claude Code, and what comes next.Fri, 16 Jan 2026 14:47:28 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/evals-were-everywhere-at-reinvent/https://hevmind.com/writing/evals-were-everywhere-at-reinvent/Evals were everywhere on the re:Invent expo floor, but the focus felt off — they are becoming observability add-ons rather than a way to reach production. Notes on Anthropic's eval-driven development talk and defensive evals, Datadog's AI tracing booth, Braintrust's mindshare, and why W&B is still the most comprehensive platform for MLE teams.Sun, 14 Dec 2025 16:47:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/open-source-ready-podcast-rethinking-ai-evals-with-adam-hevenor/https://hevmind.com/writing/open-source-ready-podcast-rethinking-ai-evals-with-adam-hevenor/Episode 27 of Open Source Ready with Brian Douglas and John McBride: what an eval actually is, running structured experiments across model variations, and why cost-efficient design matters more than ever — plus MCP adoption, Claude Skills, and the economics of AI tooling. Full transcript included.Tue, 09 Dec 2025 16:51:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/why-ai-projects-die-in-testing-and-how-we-fixed-it/https://hevmind.com/writing/why-ai-projects-die-in-testing-and-how-we-fixed-it/A 20-question eval suite on a client MCP integration took nearly eight minutes to run, so every system prompt tweak meant waiting or testing a subset and hoping. Parallel runs, standardized retries, and open-weight models took it under 30 seconds and from $0.35 a run to a penny. That became vibecheck.Tue, 21 Oct 2025 12:57:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/five-observations-from-enterprises-using-vectors-to-build-ai-applications/https://hevmind.com/writing/five-observations-from-enterprises-using-vectors-to-build-ai-applications/Vectors are transforming the dynamic AI/ML landscape, ushering in a wave of new use cases while shattering long-standing barriers. But some challenges remain.Wed, 13 Dec 2023 22:02:40 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/introducing-kube-carbon/https://hevmind.com/writing/introducing-kube-carbon/Ever wonder what kind of carbon foot print your cloud computing software is producing? What kind of improvement could you have by moving your workload from one zone to another? What about scaling to 0, how does that help? While much of t…Thu, 17 Oct 2019 21:38:42 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/kubernetes-at-4-the-worlds-next-most-dominant-technology/https://hevmind.com/writing/kubernetes-at-4-the-worlds-next-most-dominant-technology/This month has marked the 20 year birthday of the search giant Google, and the 10 year birthday of it’s most successful offspring — the mobile operating system Android. Dieter Bohn just published a great piece which lays out how Android…Fri, 28 Sep 2018 17:12:24 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/five-design-principles-for-modern-infrastructure/https://hevmind.com/writing/five-design-principles-for-modern-infrastructure/Having worked on Platform as a Service product for the last few years I have come to realize that Product Management and design for cloud products have a few unique aspects to them that make them different than other products. My experie…Mon, 27 Aug 2018 23:56:11 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/looking-through-a-glass-onion-of-user-feedback/https://hevmind.com/writing/looking-through-a-glass-onion-of-user-feedback/I am working with a new team and Program this month and these thoughts have emerged as a theme among discussions with my Product Management peers. I am also having fun listening to classic albums with my toddler for the first time and em…Mon, 28 May 2018 13:04:53 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/common-misconceptions-about-distributed-logging-systems/https://hevmind.com/writing/common-misconceptions-about-distributed-logging-systems/For many operators logging represents an immutable record of their application behavior and a necessary ledger for auditing, security, and…Wed, 25 Apr 2018 14:01:07 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/breaking-down-the-observability-problem-for-distributed-systems/https://hevmind.com/writing/breaking-down-the-observability-problem-for-distributed-systems/The observability problem space is big enough to deserve a clearer taxonomy and an honest separation of concerns. Starting from "it's just logging" — which is both a useful reality check and the source of most of the confusion — and working outward from there.Tue, 03 Apr 2018 15:28:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/why-ux-practitioners-should-learn-about-sre/https://hevmind.com/writing/why-ux-practitioners-should-learn-about-sre/Products expected to just work are hard to research the usual way; nobody offers you feedback on GPS or wifi. Reliability research and SLOs are product design tools, and the perception of poor reliability matters more than poor reliability, which is exactly why UX researchers belong in that conversation.Fri, 16 Feb 2018 16:26:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/rapid-troubleshooting-of-the-cloud-foundry-logging-system/https://hevmind.com/writing/rapid-troubleshooting-of-the-cloud-foundry-logging-system/Last year when the Google SRE Team performed their application readiness review of the Cloud Foundry platform they identified two Frequent and Damaging issues related to the log transport system Loggregator. Since then we have developed…Thu, 15 Feb 2018 23:29:18 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/heuristics-for-addressing-product-management-bias-learning-from-human-factors-in-avalanche/https://hevmind.com/writing/heuristics-for-addressing-product-management-bias-learning-from-human-factors-in-avalanche/Heuristics are rules of thumb, and here’s why they are so effective at managing bias — and some practical examples for Product Managers lifted from the world of alpinism.Mon, 22 Jan 2018 05:04:43 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/product-thinking-build-what-matters-and-ship-it/https://hevmind.com/writing/product-thinking-build-what-matters-and-ship-it/Product managers should be as comfortable at the command line as they are with sticky notes and 2x2s. What I came to think of as Product Thinking, working alongside a very mixed bench of PMs at Pivotal — some from UX, some from engineering, both effective foundations.Wed, 17 Jan 2018 16:43:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/designing-for-the-operator-experience/https://hevmind.com/writing/designing-for-the-operator-experience/Software has to be easy to operate, scale, and maintain, not just solve the user's problem. Call solving for that Operator Experience. Who operators actually are, and what a year of research with Cloud Foundry operators taught me about designing for them.Tue, 02 Jan 2018 16:33:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/software-architecture-for-product-managers/https://hevmind.com/writing/software-architecture-for-product-managers/Most PMs learn to read patterns out of user needs, then stall when those patterns meet architecture decisions. The one contribution that matters is asking a frank why — and the uncomfortable part is that plenty of engineers cannot answer it either, because small decisions have surprisingly long life cycles.Sun, 17 Dec 2017 14:41:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/10-steps-for-writing-better-user-stories/https://hevmind.com/writing/10-steps-for-writing-better-user-stories/Should designs be attached? Story first, or design first? How detailed should acceptance criteria be? Answering those makes your stories more consistent, but focusing on the life cycle of ideas maps to delivered user value faster. Ten guidelines, from my General Assembly workshop.Tue, 12 Dec 2017 16:40:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/defining-service-level-objectives-for-open-source-software/https://hevmind.com/writing/defining-service-level-objectives-for-open-source-software/With the publication of Google’s Site Reliability Engineering book many software teams are working to improve their ops practice and start…Sun, 08 Oct 2017 17:53:38 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/a-framework-for-understanding-agile-teams/https://hevmind.com/writing/a-framework-for-understanding-agile-teams/Whatever the methodology, the ability to scale small agile teams within a larger organization is crucial to succeeding in competitive…Sat, 23 Sep 2017 13:44:21 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/announcing-impact-driven-slowly/https://hevmind.com/writing/announcing-impact-driven-slowly/Sun, 05 May 2013 12:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/personal-branding-tools-and-resources/https://hevmind.com/writing/personal-branding-tools-and-resources/Sat, 24 Nov 2012 12:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/unconference-report/https://hevmind.com/writing/unconference-report/Wed, 31 Oct 2012 12:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/denver-house-of-genius/https://hevmind.com/writing/denver-house-of-genius/Fri, 27 Apr 2012 12:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/healthy-innovation-at-the-unite-for-sight-conference/https://hevmind.com/writing/healthy-innovation-at-the-unite-for-sight-conference/Mon, 23 Apr 2012 12:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/nonprofit-technology-conference-2012-music-to-my-ears/https://hevmind.com/writing/nonprofit-technology-conference-2012-music-to-my-ears/Mon, 09 Apr 2012 12:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/technology-education-the-ipad/https://hevmind.com/writing/technology-education-the-ipad/Tue, 20 Mar 2012 12:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/the-1-difference-connectivity-collaboration-and-cognitive-surplus-for-social-good/https://hevmind.com/writing/the-1-difference-connectivity-collaboration-and-cognitive-surplus-for-social-good/Mon, 10 Oct 2011 12:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/common-pitch-report/https://hevmind.com/writing/common-pitch-report/Tue, 23 Aug 2011 12:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/india-trip-report/https://hevmind.com/writing/india-trip-report/Wed, 02 Feb 2011 12:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/the-kleptones-come-in-first/https://hevmind.com/writing/the-kleptones-come-in-first/Fri, 01 Jan 2010 12:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/mobile-mobile/https://hevmind.com/writing/mobile-mobile/Sat, 19 Dec 2009 12:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/colorado-crankworks/https://hevmind.com/writing/colorado-crankworks/Mon, 03 Aug 2009 12:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/published/https://hevmind.com/writing/published/Thu, 11 Dec 2008 12:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/private-ranch-trails/https://hevmind.com/writing/private-ranch-trails/Sun, 19 Oct 2008 12:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/fall-fun/https://hevmind.com/writing/fall-fun/Wed, 08 Oct 2008 12:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/pacific-travels/https://hevmind.com/writing/pacific-travels/Wed, 27 Aug 2008 12:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/eaton-park-remix-625/https://hevmind.com/writing/eaton-park-remix-625/Sat, 28 Jun 2008 12:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/dont-call-it-a-come-back/https://hevmind.com/writing/dont-call-it-a-come-back/Fri, 13 Jun 2008 12:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/stone-skis/https://hevmind.com/writing/stone-skis/Thu, 27 Dec 2007 12:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/steep-a-skiing-documentary/https://hevmind.com/writing/steep-a-skiing-documentary/Fri, 21 Dec 2007 12:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/the-kleptones-liver-than-youll-ever-be/https://hevmind.com/writing/the-kleptones-liver-than-youll-ever-be/Tue, 11 Dec 2007 12:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/best-or-worst-of-both-worlds/https://hevmind.com/writing/best-or-worst-of-both-worlds/Sun, 02 Dec 2007 12:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/jimmy-and-tammy-show/https://hevmind.com/writing/jimmy-and-tammy-show/Tue, 06 Nov 2007 12:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/automata/https://hevmind.com/writing/automata/Mon, 29 Oct 2007 12:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/facebook-valued-at-15-billion/https://hevmind.com/writing/facebook-valued-at-15-billion/Fri, 26 Oct 2007 12:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/how-many-hits-do-i-get/https://hevmind.com/writing/how-many-hits-do-i-get/Mon, 22 Oct 2007 12:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/southwestern-tour/https://hevmind.com/writing/southwestern-tour/Tue, 25 Sep 2007 12:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/hello-world/https://hevmind.com/writing/hello-world/Wed, 12 Sep 2007 12:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/chips-cashed/https://hevmind.com/writing/chips-cashed/Fri, 23 Mar 2007 12:00:00 GMThttps://hevmind.com/writing/since-we-last-spoke/https://hevmind.com/writing/since-we-last-spoke/Thu, 07 Dec 2006 12:00:00 GMT