The Anneal log
Notes on AI that actually works.
Thinking on context, compounding intelligence, and the craft of getting real output from every AI tool. Written for the people doing the work — not a founder's diary.
July 1, 2026
Markdown Isn't Memory. Memory Isn't Direction.
A vector store and a CLAUDE.md file look like opposite solutions. They're the same one: a frozen snapshot of the past, handed to the model regardless of what the task in front of it actually needs.
Read →May 14, 2026
Related Isn't Right: Why Aim Beats Memory
A memory store retrieves what's related. Your task needs what's right. Those aren't the same thing — and the gap between them is exactly where your AI goes sideways. Here's why aim, not recall, is what makes the tool in front of you actually good.
Read →May 5, 2026
You Can Run the Whole Thing on Your Own Machine Now
The model runs on your laptop. The tools already do. The last missing piece isn't horsepower — it's giving a local model any idea of what you're actually working on. Here's how the whole stack comes together, and the part everyone gets wrong.
Read →April 28, 2026
AI Memory in 2026: Five Approaches Compared
Five architectures for AI memory have emerged in eighteen months, and they don't all solve the same problem. Here's what each actually does — and why storing memory and directing it are not the same thing.
Read →April 14, 2026
66% of Developers Say AI Gets Close But Misses the Mark. Here's Why.
The most frustrating AI output isn't wrong — it's almost right. 49,000 developers just confirmed the real bottleneck, and it isn't model quality. It's context.
Read →April 2, 2026
You Don't Have a Prompting Problem. You Have a Context Problem.
You've rewritten the same prompt four times and the answer is still 90% right. Stop editing the prompt. The problem was never how you asked — it's what the model knew when you asked. That's a fixable, and mostly automatable, engineering problem.
Read →March 27, 2026
Store and Retrieve Is Not Intelligence
A dozen tools promise to give your AI memory. None of them make it learn. Here's why remembering more isn't the same as getting smarter — and what actually moves the needle.
Read →