The Cloud Codex — field notes on building with AI agents
$ cat ./codex/README.md
Field notes on building with AI agents.
The economics and architecture of production AI — the harness around the model, what the tokens actually cost, and the platform engineering that keeps it production-grade.
by Michael Tuszynski — principal architect · ex-AWS · 25 years shipping production systems
// featured
Where Your $20K in Tokens Actually Goes
A $20K monthly token bill isn't one cost — it's a pipeline with four measurable leaks: retries, prompt bloat, MCP schema overhead, and redundant judge passes. Treat the invoice as telemetry, and half of it turns out to be waste.
// series
$ ls ./series --all →7-part series
Building an AI Assessment System
A field build of AI-graded assessment — grading written answers, testing the judge, red-teaming it, and measuring what actually moved the needle for students. Read in order.
// start here
$ grep -l signal ./essays
- An Engineer Costs $250K. Their Tokens Cost $20K. That Math Is a Trap.7 min read
- The Coding Agent Stack Has Two Layers6 min read
- Your Claude Plugin Marketplace Needs More Than a Git Repo5 min read
- The Hidden Infrastructure Cost of Running Local LLMs vs Cloud APIs: A Real-World TCO Analysis for Enterprise Deployments6 min read
- AI Agents Are Killing Seat-Based SaaS Pricing. Here's What's Replacing It.5 min read
- The Hidden AI Vendor Dependency Crisis: How to Build AI Systems That Survive Platform Wars8 min read
// most recent
$ ls -t ./essays