Vol. III · Issue 14 · MAY 2026 · Established MMXXIV
currently shipping · curate-me.ai launch prep

Hi, I'm Boris.
I build with AI,
and I write about it.

By day I do AI platform work at Microsoft on Azure. After hours I'm building curate-me.ai — a governance layer for AI agents — and this blog is its reference app. Every post here is co-authored with a small fleet of agents running on the platform; Claude does a lot of the heavy lifting. Opinions here are my own.

Writing

A field report on redesigning this blog with Claude Design — HTML handoff as the spec, whole-site remodel in one evening.

Building

Launch prep for curate-me.ai. Split VPS architecture, hype agent on autopilot, Teams + Slack HITL channels wired end-to-end.

Shipped

The Quarterly — the magazine redesign across homepage, blog, chat, about, and every post. Fraunces · Space Grotesk · DM Mono.

Reading

Agent harness taxonomy. Karpathy-loop analogs. The human-in-the-loop patterns that enterprises actually operate.

Pulled from the latest blog posts and autopilot runs on the curate-me.ai gateway.

Four things I keep coming back to

Not a framework. Just the patterns I've watched actually work — across customer calls, late-night incidents, and blog-post postmortems.

01

Governance is a feature, not a gate.

Cost caps, PII scans, and audit trails aren't the speed bumps. They're what turns a demo into a product the legal team will sign.

02

Observability is a UX problem.

If you can't watch an agent run in real time — cost, tokens, tools, checks — you don't trust it, and neither does your CFO.

03

Ship the humans the agents.

Every post on this blog is co-authored by a small fleet. The byline still says one name because the editorial judgment is still mine.

04

One thousand no's for every yes.

The pile of experiments on /demos is the small fraction that earned their place. The rest live in a graveyard branch called 'didn't-ship'.

How I got here

Abbreviated. The full version is in the blog archive.

2026
  • Launched its-boris.com as the reference app for curate-me.ai. Every post carries the Claude model and dollar cost that drafted it, right in the byline.
  • Redesigned the whole site with Claude Design — an HTML-handoff workflow from Anthropic. One URL, one prompt, a magazine-format remodel (The Quarterly) shipped in an evening.
  • Chat orchestrator wired to Anthropic's Messages API via Claude Code OAuth — readers talk to the same infrastructure I build, under the same cost caps and PII scans as any other customer.
  • Hype agent migrated to platform autopilot: agents draft blog promos, a human approves in Teams, the approved post goes out. End-to-end, governed, in production.
2025
  • Founded curate-me.ai. A governance layer for AI agents: a gateway that sees every LLM call, managed runners with BYOVM support, and observability that an operator can actually read.
  • Used Claude heavily across the whole lift — drafting the platform architecture, writing the first runner, generating the onboarding docs, co-authoring the landing pages. The product that governs agents was built with agents.
  • Split the infrastructure into two Hetzner boxes (platform + runners) to keep runaway autopilot workloads from starving the dashboard.
  • Integrated Teams and Slack as first-class HITL channels with proactive Adaptive Cards — approve / reject / comment without leaving the tools a team already uses.
2024
  • First agent-fleet experiments that shipped to production. Kept running into the same gap: the agents worked, but you couldn't show a CFO what they spent, a CISO what they touched, or a regulator who approved what. That gap is the curate-me.ai thesis.
2020 — present
  • Day job at Microsoft (Washington, DC, remote) — AI platform work on Azure.
2011 — 2020
  • Solutions architect progression across IBM, Crowe Horwath, DMI, and an independent consulting stint at Barash Consulting. Enterprise and federal programs; 15 years of shipping software into regulated environments.
2008
  • B.S. Computer Science, minor in Management — Purdue University.

What runs where

Models
  • claude-opus-4-7 (1M)
  • claude-sonnet-4-6
  • claude-haiku-4-5
  • gemini-2.0-flash
Runtime
  • curate-me.ai gateway
  • OpenClaw runners
  • BYOVM (Nimbus)
  • Postgres 16 · Drizzle ORM
Frontend
  • Next.js 16 · App Router
  • React 19
  • Tailwind 4
  • MDX · Fraunces · Space Grotesk
Governance
  • Cost caps · PII scanning
  • Audit trail · X-CM headers
  • Teams + Slack HITL
  • Anthropic Messages API + OAuth
Observability
  • Sentry
  • OpenTelemetry
  • Umami
  • Platform Pulse

The agents that help me run this place

Each one is scoped to a single job, lives on curate-me.ai, and hits the gateway with the same governance rules as customer workloads. Run counts and 24-hour spend are live.

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Get in touch

Questions about the blog, curate-me.ai, or anything you've read here — drop me a line. I read every email that comes in.