Gate
The model is not the last word
Three layers, and they do not do each other's job. The model reads and cites. A separate audit measures and can force human review. A person sets the standard. I do not ship a system where the output reaches anyone unsupervised.
Context
Each agent sees only what its job requires
Context is not free. I scope what each agent can read — the right portion, the relevant history, nothing that adds tokens without adding signal. Retrieval layers filter and rank before the reasoning layer sees anything.
Eval
Fluent text can still be wrong
Transcribe Studio scores transcripts with WER and semantic WER. A grammatically perfect output that contradicts the source still fails. I apply the same principle to every pipeline: the eval has to catch the failure mode that looks like success.
Agents
Constraints are architecture, not settings
Checkpointed state means a pipeline can stop and resume. Human escalation is a designed output, not a fallback. Tools the agent does not need are never built. The refusal is the design, not an afterthought.
Upload
Crash-safe, not a streaming platform
S3 multipart with chunk-level recovery. Liveness is real data progress — not a heartbeat, because a heartbeat cannot arrive during the outage you are recovering from. A partial file is still processed. I wrote this up publicly as the decision not to reach for Kinesis or WebSockets.
Media
Live video without the per-minute bill
Self-hosted LiveKit on Mishkat VLE. The API authorizes and issues tokens. The SFU carries the media. Authorization never moves onto the media server. Chosen because school-scale video should not be an open meter.
Access
Tenancy is a query constraint, not a UI filter
Scope is enforced where rows are read and written — not in a hidden button. A front-desk account must fail to write a lead-only discount when calling the API directly. Handlers stay thin. Services own decisions.
Ship
Deploy like a product, not like a laptop
PRs run format, lint, and types. OIDC short-lived credentials, no long-lived cloud keys in the pipeline. The box installs, starts, and hits a health check. A failed check rolls the release back automatically.