I build things
& explain how they work.
Because I am curious about tech and like clear thinking. I'm Sam, a builder and Solution Engineer in Melbourne. I write AI for the Curious: modern AI in plain English (RAG, MCP). I'm building Doppio, a real-time content layer for Google Slides.
Perspectives
Top Trumps: LLM Edition
Local models are printing impressive benchmark scores against models ten times their size. Let's read the card and see what happens when you actually play it.
Build vs Buy: The House of Mirrors
Capable open-source AI models have reignited the build vs buy debate. The economics are less obvious than they appear.
AI for the Curious
A field guide that favours working diagrams and code examples over buzzwords. My working notes on how I explain these concepts to others.
Primers
Primer: Databases
A primer on the main database technologies and how they relate to LLMs
RAG & MCP 101
A quick 101 to RAG & MCP - two key concepts for this series
Chunking for RAG
How to break documents into chunks ready for embedding, and how to tune your chunking strategy
Embedding for RAG
How we make our chunks searchable and usable by our LLM.
pgvector Setup for Airline RAG
A practical guide to setting up pgvector on Neon and running your first similarity query