Hi, I'm Michael.

An interactive architecture for building AI in spaces with high reputational risk and federal regulations — where a wrong answer is worse than no answer.

Trace a request through intent → entitlements → orchestration → grounded response → LLM-as-a-judge → audit, and watch it refuse rather than guess.

Along the way, it shows where choosing deterministic over generative pays off. Click into each node to see the thinking behind it.

Strata, sediment pressed into ordered layers, is one extraction engine, not a chatbot, for the paperwork problems industrial companies have carried since their founding: messy data, no in-house engineering.

Where Granite is maximum governance, this is maximum simplicity: it reads the mess, writes the structured record, and asks a human only when it isn't sure.

Built on real data: interviews with two operators with 35+ years inside a national installer, plus the three summers I spent working in its branches.

A cairn is a pile of rocks stacked to mark the route — now mostly used as a landmark or for an Instagram photo. This one tells you whether you can still get a permit.

I built it for my friends and me after 5+ years of planning Sierra trips the manual way: one site for the latest beta, another for weather, and, most annoying of all, refreshing for permits.

Describe a trip in plain language and Cairn returns routes with live permit availability, a packing list tuned to current conditions, and a GPX file for Garmin & Strava.

My friends and I couldn't rely on the live times Apple Maps showed for our Golden Gate Transit and Presidio GO commutes. So I built a tracker for each, connected straight to the source: the agency's own real-time feed.

Every arrival time on screen says where it came from: the bus's GPS, the agency's prediction, or just the timetable. When a trip is canceled or the feed goes stale, the page says so instead of guessing.

It also knows the rules the feeds leave out, like Presidio GO's pass-only rush-hour runs and its weekend schedule on federal holidays. Tap the bus you're on and it counts down your stops, then tells you when to pull the cord.