Essays·5 selected·caskeycoding.com
Selected writing
Selected essays on spec-driven systems, safety guardrails, and AI reliability, plus the low-latency C++ and open-source AI work behind them. The full archive lives at Caskey Engineering.
July 9, 2026
Fifteen Million Was the Easy Part
A clean C++ options pricer, tuned from 15 to 215 million prices a second. Most of my speedup assumptions died one measurement at a time.
Caskey Engineering
June 27, 2026
Ballast: An LLM App Whose Best Feature Is Saying 'I Don't Know'
A RAG system whose most important feature is refusing to answer. How trust got built into the architecture instead of the prompt.
Caskey Engineering
May 19, 2026
Building an AI Finance App
An honest account of what worked, what did not, and why the hard part is rarely the AI.
Caskey Engineering
April 10, 2026
Designing Safety Guardrails for Distributed Workflow Orchestration
What I've learned building validation engines for infrastructure where an incorrect “yes” is a production incident.
Caskey Engineering
June 20, 2025
Spec-Driven Development and the Folder Architecture That Makes It Work
How I structure projects so AI agents and humans can both find their way around. This is the methodology behind everything else.
Caskey Engineering