Essays & field notes
Collin Wilkins
Software engineer and technical leader. I write about distributed and event-driven systems, infrastructure, developer tooling, and what AI-native development looks like once it has to survive production, review, and the people who maintain it.
Latest writing
All articles
How My Markdown Vault Became a Company Brain
My Obsidian vault works as AI context because agents retrieve only the files a task needs, while a narrow maintenance skill keeps the navigation layer current.
Read the essay- Use OneNote and Microsoft 365 Copilot as a Company Brain If years of decisions, meeting notes, and project history already live in OneNote, start there. A small, well-structured notebook can give Microsoft 365 Copilot enough context to find decisions, identify owners, and admit when an answer is missing.
- Start Your Company Brain in a GitHub Repository Before adding embeddings or a vector database, put the material your agent needs in a repository it can inspect. Then test whether direct search is already enough.
- When Your Company Brain Outgrows a Folder I built an AWS knowledge base over internal documents, then exposed retrieval through MCP. The lesson was not the vector database. It was learning where retrieval ends and evidence begins.
By topic
The archive, sorted by the part of the stack it argues about.
Collin's Thoughts
One letter, every other Tuesday.
Every other Tuesday, I share what I have been building, what I learned along the way, and a few articles or findings worth your time.
Read past issues first. Unsubscribe whenever.
Projects & experiments
- Tool Agent Harness Builder Generates the repository scaffolding a coding agent needs to be useful: conventions, protected paths, verification hooks, and a reviewable change path.
- Experiment Ask the archive Retrieval over every article on this site — a small Python RAG service with its own corpus, rate limiting, and evaluation harness.
- Resource AI Prompt Toolkit The prompts I actually reuse for engineering work, written out in full rather than summarized.
- Product FiNimbus A founder-owned financial software project, built and operated outside of any employer. Written up from the inside: automating its signup flow over a weekend.
Why I write about the unglamorous parts.
My work centers on distributed and event-driven systems, cloud infrastructure, and the developer tooling that decides whether a team can change its own software safely. Most of what I publish starts as something I had to figure out anyway — a system that behaved strangely under load, a workflow that only worked because one person remembered the trick, an agent that looked productive until someone reviewed the diff.
I came to engineering by way of finance, pricing, and operations, which is why I still start with the boring numbers before the architecture diagram. More about me →