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Software Sushi / JournalEngineering · Ideas · Field notes

AI engineering
insights.

Read Software Sushi articles on AI engineering, machine learning, software development, and production systems.

Ideas worth building on.

22 articles in the journal

Concept illustration of a packaged software panel, separate custom modules, and a product connected to an extra module: buy, build, or combine.
AI

Custom AI vs. Off-the-Shelf AI: When Does Building Make Sense?

Use a furniture manufacturer’s forecasting decision to compare off-the-shelf AI, custom development, and a combined approach on business value and total cost.

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Cover in pine green. A stack of document pages flows into a grid of small green squares that stand for vector chunks, with three highlighted in mustard. On the right, an answer card shows three numbered citation markers. Title: RAG in Production. Subtitle: 18,755 chunks, local embeddings, cited answers.
AI

RAG in Production: 18,755 Chunks, Local Embeddings, and Cited Answers

How we built a private RAG pipeline on our own hardware: Docling, PII redaction, bge-m3, Qdrant hybrid search with an ACL filter, and a local model compared with a hosted one on 64 questions.

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Illustrated cover with a sunset over layered teal hills. An AI assistant asks which AMI to use for a vector database. Through the Model Context Protocol it reaches a read-only MCP server with five tools, search_amis, get_ami, compare_amis, list_recent_updates and get_marketplace_url, plus two resources. The server is backed by a catalog of 43 AWS Marketplace AMIs, rebuilt daily, with example hourly software prices of $0.02 for Langfuse and Qdrant and $0.10 for OpenShell.
AI

We Built an MCP Server for Our AWS Marketplace Catalog: What We Learned

How we built a read-only MCP server for 43 AWS Marketplace AMIs in TypeScript, with live catalog data, the eight practices that shaped it, and what production still needs.

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Two people reviewing a tablet mockup while checking off items on a written test checklist
AI

AI Proof of Concept: What to Prove, What It Costs, and Who to Hire

What an AI proof of concept should prove, how it differs from a prototype or pilot, what drives cost, and how to choose a PoC partner.

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Illustration: an AI agent works at a terminal inside a glowing green sandbox cube, ringed by policy boundaries that let some connections through.
AI

NVIDIA OpenShell on AWS: Your Agent, Your Rules

Give your AI agent a sandbox with rules. See how NVIDIA OpenShell fits with the model and agent, start a first sandbox on our AWS AMI, and watch a real task hit the boundary.

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A PHI document passes through review points for access, vendor, audit, and testing before reaching a language model
AI

Is a Healthcare LLM Safe to Use With PHI? 6 Questions

Send PHI to a healthcare LLM only after six questions: scope, provider, path, access, behavior, and operations.

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Editorial illustration of a highlighted source passage selected from documents and connected to an answer
AI

How to Evaluate RAG Retrieval Quality Before You Tune the Model

A practical framework for evaluating RAG retrieval separately from generation with labeled queries, layered metrics, human review, and release gates.

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Two medical professionals discuss tablets during a focused healthcare work session
AI

When Is Your Application Ready to Handle PHI?

A practical framework for assessing whether a healthcare AI application is ready to handle PHI across data flows, vendors, controls, testing, and operations.

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RAG vs. Fine-tuning: an editorial illustration of highlighted source documents alongside paired input and response training examples.
AI

RAG vs. Fine-Tuning: How to Actually Choose

How RAG and fine-tuning differ, what enterprises actually use, and how to choose based on changing data, evaluation, and total cost.

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Precision components pass through an inspection line as an operator intervenes at the first warning signal
Machine Learning

Why Machine Learning Models Quietly Get Worse After Launch

Why production ML models lose accuracy over time, how aging differs from drift, and what effective monitoring and intervention look like.

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Fragile prototype tracks reaching dead ends while one engineered route connects to a working production conveyor
AI

Why Most AI Pilots Never Reach Production (And What Separates the Ones That Do)

Why promising AI pilots stall before production, and what successful teams do differently across data, workflows, ownership, and integration.

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Hands narrowing a colorful project board to a deliberately small first-release scope
AI

How to Plan Your First AI/Tech Project (Without Wasting Time or Money)

A practical guide to planning AI projects that succeed — covering common pitfalls, MVP strategy, and the strategic groundwork most teams skip.

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Forecast drawn toward a target while a real paper glider misses beside excess inventory
AI

AI Forecasting Mistakes: The $10K AI Project That Almost Cost $40K

This post breaks down a common but costly mistake in AI forecasting: data leakage from random splitting — and shows how the right validation approach turned unreliable predictions into trusted business decisions.

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Handmade browser frame receiving a puzzle-shaped extension module
AI

Designing a Browser Extension using AI and Machine Learning; A Guide

A blog covering the basics of developing a chrome extension, as well as how to integrate one with the OpenAI API.

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Three construction workers in orange hard hats and safety vests, seen from behind on a steel-frame site at sunset, each hard hat inside a YOLO detection box labeled hardhat with its confidence score.
Computer Vision

Train a Custom YOLO Object Detector on a Mac: Dataset to Live Video

Fine-tune YOLO11n to detect hard hats on an Apple M4, export it to CoreML and ONNX, and run it frame by frame, with the code and every measured number.

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Abstract paper cards moving through a branching physical classifier
AI

Building a Powerful Content Moderation Classifier with Scikit-Learn and LightGBM

Content moderation is a critical task for any online platform. The goal is to automatically identify and flag content that violates community guidelines, covering categories like hate speech, harassment, or self-harm.

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A cook tastes a family meal while another person checks ingredients in the refrigerator
AI

Building a Recipe Assistant with AI

Imagine having a virtual assistant that understands user preferences, context, and queries with precision—providing relevant and tailored responses in seconds. This is the promise of an AI-powered chatbot, a tool designed to make interactions more intuitive, efficient, and personalized using OpenAI API and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks such as LangChain.

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Illustrative face detection box enclosing a woman’s face
Computer Vision

Face Detection with OpenCV

In this first blog of a new three part series in OpenCV, we will be covering face detection using OpenCV.

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Clay parrot with a split photographic and edge-detection illustration
Computer Vision

OpenCV Edge, Shape, and Feature Detection

A hands-on OpenCV guide to Sobel, Laplacian, and Canny edge detection, contours, morphological operations, template matching, Fourier and Hough transforms, and histogram equalization.

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A red pear and blue cup seen through clear and frosted optical glass
Computer Vision

OpenCV Filtering, Thresholding, and Image Segmentation

A practical OpenCV guide to color space conversion, blurring and filtering, thresholding, Otsu binarization, GrabCut, connected components, and watershed segmentation, with Python code.

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Hand shaping exposure over a parrot print in a working darkroom
Computer Vision

OpenCV Image Manipulation: Transforms, Arithmetic, and Masks

A hands-on OpenCV guide to geometric transforms, image arithmetic, bitwise operations, masking, and color channels, with Python code and output for every technique.

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