Robert Tucker

Twenty years building customer-communications integration. Writing in public about AI-native work for the technical middle.

Latest

Published on: August 4, 2026

Stale state can't hide

ai mcp para-vault-mcp lab-note

My daily review ran clean against a version of my day that was hours out of date. The tool had handed back a path to the note instead of the note, and a path is an invitation to skip the read. v0.5 of para-vault-mcp is about freshness: make the tool defeat the cache instead of asking the caller to remember.

Published on
July 3, 2026
Make the silence loud
ai mcp para-vault-mcp lab-note
A find_project query returned an empty array, and the LLM confidently told the user they had nothing — while four projects sat invisible behind one line of unquoted YAML. v0.4 of para-vault-mcp is about silences: wrong-but-confident answers, and the review discipline that fixes them even below the public bar.
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Published on
June 24, 2026
Compensation tells you what your job actually is
presales generalist-integrator ai
Twenty years ago, a manager told me the fix I'd written to save a deal was a mistake. He wasn't wrong about the system — but my comp plan paid on closes, and the comp plan is the contract that tells you what your job actually is.
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Published on
June 16, 2026
The review composed the tool
ai mcp para-vault-mcp lab-note
Two of para-vault-mcp's tools just absorbed three Bash ops I was running every evening to start the daily review. The shape they took came from the review, not the vault.
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Published on
June 10, 2026
Two surfaces of truth, one quiet correction
ai mcp para-vault-mcp lab-note
I asked my own MCP a routine question and it caught me lying to myself. The thing worth writing about isn't that the MCP worked — it's which thing it got right.
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Robert Tucker

Stale state can't hide

Make the silence loud

Compensation tells you what your job actually is

The review composed the tool

Two surfaces of truth, one quiet correction