NN Nikhil Navali

Writing

Notes on agent design, evaluation, and the failure modes that only show up in production. Mostly things learned the expensive way.

Own the memory, rent the model

Sep 2026

Five months running Karpathy's llm-wiki pattern: what a portable memory layer actually buys, where it's worth diverging from the gist, and the three ways maintenance quietly fails.

Write the standards, not the steps

Sep 2026

An autonomous research agent had to move to a domain it was never built for. The port took two days — and the reason was a ratio: nine parts standards, one part domain.