Infrastructure engineer, AI practitioner, Homelab builder, Dad-joke Deliveryman. Documenting the work.https://mikemcmahon.dev/https://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/credits/https://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/credits/The people who made this journey possible.Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/how-i-got-here/https://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/how-i-got-here/From a Commodore 64 in 1983 to infrastructure engineer and AI practitioner — the long road.Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/project-agent-eval-harness/https://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/project-agent-eval-harness/A fixed scenario suite with Prometheus instrumentation for comparing LLM models on real infrastructure automation tasks.Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/project-agent-lab/https://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/project-agent-lab/The foundation: a controlled infrastructure execution agent with LLM-assisted diagnosis, strict guardrails, and Prometheus observability.Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/project-ai-engineering-plan/https://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/project-ai-engineering-plan/A structured 4-project lab plan targeting AI Implementation Architect / Staff Engineer readiness — mapped directly to Nate Jones's 7 employer-cited AI skills.Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/project-failure-detection-dashboard/https://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/project-failure-detection-dashboard/Infrastructure observability for AI agent failures — 6 failure modes instrumented via Prometheus/Grafana, cost analysis of OCR model selection, runbooks for diagnosis.Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/project-local-inference/https://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/project-local-inference/An M5 Max MacBook Pro as a local AI inference node: Ollama, 70B and 32B models, unified memory architecture, and a comparison framework for benchmarking local vs. cloud-hosted inference.Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/project-multi-agent-lab/https://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/project-multi-agent-lab/A 3-agent Planner/Terraform/Validator pipeline for Proxmox homelab automation with LLM-powered failure diagnosis. Zero LLM calls on clean runs.Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/project-openbrain/https://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/project-openbrain/A personal and family RAG knowledge system — Supabase pgvector backend, Vercel API layer, MCP-integrated into Claude Code sessions.Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/project-openbrain-2-architecture/https://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/project-openbrain-2-architecture/A home network hardware migration exposed the fundamental flaw in my RAG system. Here's the architecture Claude and I designed to fix it: temporal state, write safety, and a compounding wiki layer.Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/session-agent-eval-harness/https://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/session-agent-eval-harness/A fixed scenario suite with Prometheus instrumentation and baseline JSON output for comparing LLM models on real infrastructure automation tasks.Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/session-ai-compliance-failure/https://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/session-ai-compliance-failure/An honest postmortem on why an AI assistant repeatedly violated explicit git workflow rules—and why the only solution was to remove the capability to violate them.Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/session-building-openbrain/https://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/session-building-openbrain/Standing up a Retrieval-Augmented Generation system backed by Supabase pgvector, hosted on Vercel, and wired into Claude Code sessions via MCP.Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/session-context-preservation/https://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/session-context-preservation/Building the memory and session-wrap infrastructure that makes long-running AI-assisted projects tractable.Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/session-dynamic-clippy-recent-posts/https://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/session-dynamic-clippy-recent-posts/Built AI-powered Clippy quip generation from HackerNews, added responsive recent posts section to homepage, and fixed CI/CD pipeline Node.js compatibility.Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/session-email-subscription-rss/https://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/session-email-subscription-rss/Building a production-grade email subscription system with daily digest newsletters, Brevo SMTP integration, and solving vendor link-tracking quirks along the way.Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/session-ingest-pipeline-evolution/https://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/session-ingest-pipeline-evolution/How a Nate B. Jones video on token burn sent me down the rabbit hole of fixing OpenBrain's ingest pipeline — PDF classification, vision OCR, structured chunking, and a 5-model eval.Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/session-keeping-production-running/https://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/session-keeping-production-running/Fixed critical blog rendering regression, established global Claude Code infrastructure, and added comprehensive smoke test suite to catch regressions before they reach users.Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/session-local-inference/https://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/session-local-inference/Hard system lockups traced to memory exhaustion from loading a 40GB model on a 48GB machine. Three env vars fixed it. Also: real inference validation via smoke check, and why the 70B is off the default toolchain.Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/session-multi-agent-system/https://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/session-multi-agent-system/Building a 3-agent Planner/Terraform/Validator pipeline that diagnoses its own failures using LLM reasoning — deployed against live Proxmox infrastructure.Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/session-security-hardening/https://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/session-security-hardening/Adding bearer token auth to raw API endpoints, a two-layer injection detection gate, a query audit log, and a nightly parent session report delivered via Vercel Cron.Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/session-token-economics/https://mikemcmahon.dev/blog/session-token-economics/Building a Python CLI that projects cost across six models by task type and complexity, using real cost data from the agent eval harness and OCR eval.Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT