Welcome to The Foundry

I spent 20 years in safety-critical software. Now I'm applying that rigor to AI applications.

I am a Systems Engineer by trade. I’ve spent decades ensuring that planes don’t fall out of the sky and medical devices don’t fail patients. My philosophy has always been: Clean Architecture, strict boundaries, and zero tolerance for "magic."

But the world is changing. The rise of AI and "vibe coding" tempts us to trade architecture for speed. I believe we can have both.

This blog is the documentation of my experiments in the "Messy Middle" of the new economy. It is the story of how I am bootstrapping complex, full-stack AI platforms (like FRAKTAG and AMODX) without sacrificing engineering discipline.

Here, I dissect the move from Monoliths to Microservices, the integration of RAG pipelines into Java Spring Boot, and the reality of building serverless architectures on AWS.

I am building in public. I am sharing the code, the architecture decisions, and the painful lessons learned. Welcome to The Foundry.

By the way, this blog is entirely hosted on AmodX, the stack I wrote myself.

As a side note, FRAKTAG is now able to replace the entire coaching app I wrote last year, all by itself. And it costs WAY less to run since I select which sources to use instead of injecting the whole knowledge base for the AI to untangle.