Rick Hallett

Agentic systems engineer. Building verification infrastructure for human-AI collaboration, and learning in public about what that requires.

earth. lets stop the slop.

writing / research / about

Recent

2026-03-10 The Agentic Engineering Bootcamp
A first-principles curriculum for SWEs who steer AI agents. Five bootcamps, 51 steps, 208-259 hours. From Linux primitives to evaluation pipelines.
2026-03-01 Build your house from paper and 0.37% of the time you'll get screwed 100% of the time
A standing order said 'read the file.' The file was 33,700 tokens. So we wrote 60 lines of JavaScript.
2026-03-01 33,700 tokens on boot and nobody noticed
I pointed a tokeniser at the repo. The boot sequence had an elephant in it.
2026-03-01 Catching in the Wind: A Naturalist's Guide to Slopiculture
Patterns caught in the wild while building something else entirely.
2026-03-01 I think they might actually be trying to kill me
The problem with being earnest.