Terry Li
AI consultant writing about agent architecture, banking AI governance, and building systems that think.
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All 353 posts →- I Built 200 CLIs for My AI. Here's What Actually Matters.
A Chinese article argues CLI is becoming the AI plugin format. I've been living this for months with 442 tools. The article is right about CLI. It's wrong about what makes CLI work.
- The Template Is the Schema
Seven PyPI releases of a CV generation tool in one afternoon taught me that template-guided synthesis lives and dies by what the template already contains.
- Assume the LLM never ran
A 208 MB log, 59,356 retries, and zero LLM calls. A debugging story about what happens when the symptom lies about the cause.
- Same Trigger, One Skill
A simple rule for keeping AI agent skill systems coherent: if two skills fire on the same trigger, merge them. Different trigger, different skill. No exceptions.
- Overnight Autonomous AI Coding: What Actually Works
I left an AI coding pipeline running overnight with 21 monitoring cycles. 5 features merged, 10 specs dispatched, 3 root causes found. Here's what worked, what broke, and the quality of the output.
- The reversible direction
When choosing CLI vs MCP, pick the one you can undo. CLI wraps into MCP cheaply. MCP does not unwrap.
- The One Env Var That Cost a Day
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY vs ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN — how a single wrong environment variable made an AI coding pipeline silently fail for hours, and the debugging journey that found it.
- What Anthropic's Managed Agents validates — and what to steal
Anthropic shipped a hosted agent platform. Its architecture looks familiar. Here's what a solo builder can learn from how they decoupled the brain from the hands.
- What LLM Wiki Looks Like After Six Months
Karpathy's LLM Wiki pattern is a good starting point. Here's what changes when you run it for real — enforcement over convention, decay over growth, and knowledge that fires without being asked.
- Biology as a Design Constraint: How Cell Biology Names Generate Architecture
Using cell biology naming not as metaphor but as engineering manual — how mTOR's biology predicted circuit breakers, autophagy, and negative feedback loops before we designed them.