AI: From the Engine Room
A 13-article series on modern AI from a data engineering perspective.
Series Premise
“The engine room isn’t a better vantage point than the bridge, just a different one, with different things visible.”
Most AI commentary comes from executives, analysts, consultants. This series comes from someone who worked on attention mechanisms before ChatGPT made them famous, recognizing the machinery inside today’s headlines.
Structure
Pillar 1: AI Mechanisms (Articles 1-5)
How attention, training, and context actually work. Intuition over exhaustive detail.
Pillar 2: The Proprietary Data Paradox (Articles 6-9)
Why data strategy is harder than it looks. Knowledge architecture, tacit expertise, interface design.
Pillar 3: Forward-Looking Governance (Articles 10-13)
Hallucination, prompting, why AI readiness is a governance question.
The Through-Line
“These systems are more comprehensible than marketing suggests, and more limited than hype implies. Both things are true simultaneously.”
Article Index
| # | Title | Location |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | I’ve Heard This Engine Before | 05-organism—engine-room-01-introduction |
| 02 | The Attention Mechanism Explained | 05-organism—engine-room-02-attention |
| 03 | Training Economics | Draft |
| 04 | The Efficiency Illusion | Draft |
| 05 | Context Windows and Memory | 05-organism—engine-room-05-context |
| 06 | The Multiplier Effect | Draft |
| 07 | The Tacit Knowledge Bottleneck | 07-organism—engine-room-07-tacit-knowledge |
| 08 | Why Vectors Aren’t Enough | Draft |
| 09 | UI as the Ultimate Guardrail | 07-organism—engine-room-09-ui-guardrail |
| 10 | Hallucination is a Feature | 05-organism—engine-room-10-hallucination |
| 11 | Working With the Machine | Draft |
| 12 | AI Readiness Is Governance | 04-organism—engine-room-12-governance |
| 13 | What the Engine Room Taught Me | 07-organism—engine-room-13-synthesis |
Status: 8 of 13 articles complete and publication-ready.