About

I’m ikkun — a software engineer who has been running AI coding agents in production, every day, since before it was a job title.

This journal exists because most writing about AI agents is either vendor marketing or “here’s a cool prompt” content. Almost nobody writes about the boring parts: which agent to use for which task, how to wire up MCP servers without breaking your secrets, why your gateway costs doubled, what to do when the agent deletes your .env.

That’s the gap I write into.

What I actually do

• Run a fleet of coding and automation agents daily: Claude Code, Codex, opencode, and Hermes — for real work, not demos
• Build and maintain MCP servers and agent tooling, including trustless, an open-source credential broker that keeps API keys out of agent context
• Operate self-hosted LLM infrastructure (vLLM, local models, gateways) and production automation on a mix of cloud free tiers and self-hosted services
• Work with LLM gateways (OpenRouter, Merge, Vercel AI Gateway) and know exactly where the bills come from

How to read this journal

Every post is first-hand. If I recommend a tool, I used it in production — with dates, numbers, and failures included. If I haven’t tested something hands-on, I say so instead of padding a listicle.

Opinions are mine. Affiliate links fund the site but never change what I recommend — that’s the deal, spelled out in the editorial policy.

You can find me on GitHub.