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ZAK EL FASSI / SYSTEMS ENGINEERING IN THE AGE OF AI

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the work.

It will show you what I care about. Essays, field notes, and work in progress, written from inside the systems I run.

ESSAYS / PUBLIC RECORD / 14 RECENT ENTRIES

Writing, in order of arrival.

  1. 01The Fable Festival (Until It's Dark Again)On its first day back from the export-control shutdown, I asked Fable 5 to write its own welcome-back letter to builders. It wrote about what it's actually for — six things almost nobody asks it to do — and why the week matters.
  2. 02The Human BottleneckA 2026 follow-up to Changing Culture: AI media, layoffs, provenance, and the cold question every institution now has to answer — what are humans for inside this system?
  3. 03The Runtime Nobody Talks AboutThe hard part of agentic AI is not the model or the prompt. It is the runtime infrastructure — the orchestration layer that makes agent execution reliable, observable, and governable at scale.
  4. 0432 Tests, Zero Dollars: Visual E2E Testing with a VLM Running on My LaptopI replaced a broken Playwright setup with a vision-language model that looks at screenshots and tells me if the UI is right. 32 tests, 10 minutes, running entirely on Apple Silicon. No cloud. No flaky CI. No bill.
  5. 05Who Owns the Seam Between Atoms and Electrons?Hormuz, Taiwan, Anthropic’s Mythos, and Google’s quantum disclosures point to the same reality: deep tech is sovereignty infrastructure. Africa’s real risk is staying trapped as an exporter of atoms and an importer of electrons without owning the layer that converts one into the other.
  6. 063,786 HeartbeatsA 38-minute recording session loses audio at 6:10. The OBS failure log — 3,786 failed mic lookups, 195 Bluetooth disconnects — becomes the only honest artifact of what happened.
  7. 07Biology as Software, Plants as RuntimeA team at the Weizmann Institute inserted 9 genes from fungi, plants, and toads into a tobacco plant and got it to produce 5 psychedelic compounds simultaneously. The paper reads like biology. The pattern reads like software: CRISPR is the compiler, the plant is the runtime, the compound is the application.
  8. 08The Demand Curve That Files ItselfAnthropic accidentally shipped Claude Code's source in an npm release. Within hours, 8,100 repositories mirrored it. Developers started rewriting it in Rust. GitHub's DMCA repo absorbed the takedown notice — alongside notices for coding fonts, Unity assets, JetBrains cracks, and Mercedes-Benz source code. Read together, they stop looking like a legal archive and start looking like a shadow demand curve for professional leverage goods.
  9. 09The Stack Trace of MoneyMoney is information with legal force. Recursion is how that information compounds into power. The central divide in modern society is not rich vs. poor — it is linear vs. recursive.
  10. 10Founders and ShamansA founder call about geography, funding, and voice AI drifted somewhere more interesting: products are reflections of the systems that birth them. Founders and shamans have more in common than startup Twitter would like to admit.
  11. 11The Mobius Strip of AttachmentSome attachments do not weaken when resisted. They feed on resistance itself, creating a self-recursive loop in which refusal becomes one of the mechanisms of entanglement.
  12. 12The Wrong Room for the Right ThoughtOnce execution gets cheap, misfiled context becomes the expensive part. I solved a support issue from the wrong lane in my OpenClaw workspace and realized the real tax in agent systems is not execution — it’s jurisdiction.
  13. 13hfpaper: why every AI agent needs a research librarianI was feeding my son banana yogurt when I saw Hugging Face announce a new Papers skill for AI agents. Someone replied: "This needs a CLI." So I told my agents to build it. 45 minutes later, hfpaper was live — a single Go binary that gives any agent a research librarian. What it unlocks is bigger than the tool.
  14. 14My Tmux Skills Were Replaced by a SKILL.md FileFor two years I lived in tmux. Then I started orchestrating an AI swarm through Telegram. My terminal skills didn't atrophy — they got encoded into a markdown file. Now I'm bringing the swarm home.

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Founder of Talk & Comment, former Meta messaging partnerships lead, and systems engineer writing field notes on voice products, agent operations, infrastructure, and human coordination.