ai strategy, architecture + management · twenty years engineering · philadelphia + new york
I'm Danny Nakhla.
AI
I help organizations adopt and use AI: strategy, architecture, and mapping what is actually possible. Strong views, earned across twenty years of engineering and the last four and a half building agentic AI and RAG systems for Fortune 500 teams. My side projects and explorations, Penny and letmecheckbot among them, run daily in the open, where a regression shows up the same hour it ships and every number is public.
Worked with Fortune 500 teams across finance, pharma, media, and logistics. How I got here →
The lab
All of it →Two production agents I run on my own infrastructure, every day. Side projects with production discipline: the client work is under NDA, so these run in the open, and I break them on purpose to see what holds up.
An autonomous operator on my own home server. One agent in a loop, many tools, a workflow engine as the biggest tool. I run it to pressure-test single-agent architecture, runner selection, and the eval gate that decides when work is done.
Clauden8nPostgressingle agent How it works Running daily since 2022 letmecheckbotA multi-user agent that turns a Telegram group chat into the interface. Say “robot” and it fact-checks the claim, reads the link, finds the clip, settles the argument, all in the thread, so nobody leaves the room. One cheap model, no fallback, and a memory that recalls by meaning. In front of a group that would tell me if it got worse.
TelegramOpenRouterWhispermulti-user How it worksAlso in the lab: a portrait pipeline that renders my own headshots, a paper-trading bot, and the renderer that makes this site’s share cards. See the lab →
Writing
All essays →Operating notes from running my production agents. Every number comes from the running system.
Start here · MAY 2026 From a fleet of agents to one agent: what changed and whyI stopped designing fleets of specialized agents and committed to one agent in a loop with many tools. Here is what I used to believe, what changed my mind, and what I publish from here on.
Read the milestone
Editing n8n by hand fights the canvas. I made it show me a diff.
Tap Ask to edit on any workflow at app.946nl.online. Type a plain-English change. Get a diff preview of nodes added, removed, and modified before any commit hits the n8n REST API. Editing live n8n workflows by hand fights the canvas. Editing them by agent without a preview commits regressions you cannot see. The patte…
My agent has a terminal. It doesn't need MCP.
MCP loads every tool's full description into the model's memory at the start of every session. A command line costs nothing until the agent reads the manual. My agent runs hundreds of commands a day with a screen off that would have made MCP win, so the math stays with the shell. The one place that genuinely can't open a terminal already has a door I own.
Cookie transplant: how my agent posts as a real account
Reddit's bot detection does not like fresh Chromium sessions. So I stopped giving it fresh sessions. When an agent has to post as a real account on platforms with mature bot detection, a vanilla Playwright launch loses on the first request. The pattern that ships: take an already-authenticated host browser session, tr…
A five-dollar AI scored 76. The professionals scored 84.
There is a little robot in my group chat that runs on a five-dollar-a-month AI. I gave it the real work of 44 jobs, graded against the professionals' own work, and it came within eight points of the pros. This is what an evaluation is, what the setup around a model changes and what it doesn't, and why the same model can be worth three different numbers depending on who measures it.
Cognitive surrender happens at the approval gate
Everyone will run agent fleets eventually. The dangerous part is the human at the approval gate, nodding work through without reading it. Addy Osmani coined 'cognitive surrender' after running fleets of agents and going heavy on autonomous operation. The piece takes his term and pushes on the inversion: 'autonomous' gets framed as the de…