Brian previously founded Open Sauced, where he worked on increasing knowledge and adoption within open source communities. His current focus is AI infrastructure and agent systems — building observational memory pipelines using Kafka, Flink, and DuckDB to help agents get better every run.
briandouglas.me ↗We built Paper Compute to close the Agent Gap — the inability to prove what an agent did, audit its actions, or replay its decisions. Here's what we built and why.
Read more →I hit the same Confluent Cloud bugs across two projects. The second time, I extracted a skill from my tapes sessions instead of debugging from scratch. Now every agent I run knows the fix.
Read more →Agents don't need to remember everything. They need to observe what went wrong. Structured logs become telemetry, telemetry becomes signals, and signals become the context for the next run.
Read more →Once agents got good enough to clone repos, install dependencies, modify files, and execute code they just wrote, the natural question became: where does this actually run? Sandboxes were designed for short-lived, contained execution. Agents aren't snippets.
Read more →An AI agent played Pokémon Red for 1,000 turns without leaving the bedroom. The failure wasn't the model. It was the absence of telemetry.
Read more →Every commercial aircraft carries a flight recorder. Agent systems don't. The gap between an agent that works and an agent you can trust in production is telemetry.
Read more →Optimizing for model performance while ignoring execution infrastructure is like choosing the fastest race car without checking whether the track has guardrails. The real engineering challenge isn't squeezing more capability out of LLMs—it's figuring out how to actually run them safely.
Read more →Agents are now consequential enough to warrant national-level oversight. Compliance doesn't require weaker AI—it requires observable AI. The observable era is the one that scales.
Read more →Visibility is the easiest piece. The hard part is analyzing and understanding what you're observing. The next phase of agent infrastructure won't be defined by visibility—it will be defined by durability.
Read more →If you're paying $100/month but consuming multiples of that in value, you have to start wondering when that's going to catch up to you. The AI coding tool market is following a familiar playbook.
Read more →Documentation that writes itself sounds like a gimmick. For tapes.dev, it's an operational reality. Here's how we wired continuous AI into our workflow to keep docs accurate as the codebase evolves.
Read more →Why AI Needs Distributed Systems Infrastructure
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