Beyond the Agent Hype: 5 Engineering Rules from 10 Weeks of Building Bounded AI Systems
Ten weeks, nine posts, and four working systems.
The practical question behind all of it: how do you build useful AI systems where cost, connectivity, data privacy, and human accountability are hard constraints?
The industry narrative is dominated by cloud-first, fully autonomous agents operating with unlimited budgets. JigsawFlux took a different direction: local inference, offline-first architectures, Kubernetes home labs, and strict state-machine controls.
The path is visible in retrospect: direct local LLM wrappers gave way to stateful agent workflows, which gave way to bounded edge systems for clinical consultation, travel risk assessment, and NHS appointment recovery.
This is what those nine posts covered, what connects them, and the five engineering rules that emerged from the work.