Closing the Loop, One Step at a Time

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Most of what I know about working with AI, I learned by watching.

The software foundations came first: school, self-teaching, curiosity, my first job. When AI started being a thing, I applied what I already knew to it, because there was nothing else to apply. No rules, no guidance. Just a new technology that I knew would change everything.

In the early open-source days, working with the first Llama 13B, you did not have a choice. The context window was two thousand tokens. Every token you sent mattered, and every token that came back told you something. If the model gave a strange answer, the cause was usually sitting right there in the prompt: an example pulled the output sideways, a loose word got interpreted literally, something important fell off the end when the window filled up. With this technology the smallest thing can change the result. So I built a habit early: look at the output, then trace back how we got there.

Observability on Byron DG — The Upstream

Closing the Loop, One Step at a Time