• sidequest 2026-08-08

  Mapping a fake lending app to the Agentic Development Lifecycle

  Somewhere around the third or fourth session building Cashew Capital, I learned there's already a name for the process I'd been stumbling through: the ADLC. Here's how the work maps to it — and the gaps I'm leaving open on purpose.

• sidequest 2026-08-07

  Hardening a fake lending assistant: RAG and tool calls

  Cashew Advisor could talk convincingly about loans. It couldn't guarantee its facts or its math were actually right — until I added retrieval and tool calling to fix both, in that order.

• sidequest 2026-08-03

  Picking a model with evidence instead of a guess

  Before I let Cashew Advisor run on whatever model I happened to pick first, I built a small harness to test cost, latency, and safety across a few options — and found the cheapest one wasn't quietly worse.

• sidequest 2026-07-29

  Building a fake fintech company to learn AI-assisted infrastructure work

  I'm a sales engineer, not a developer. Over a few sessions with Cursor and Claude, I stood up a fictional AI lending platform on real AWS infrastructure — and learned more from what broke than from what worked.

• sidequest 2026-06-10

  How this site went from zero to live in one night

  Node, git, DNS, and a lot of trial and error — the real, unglamorous path from an empty folder to a working personal website.