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Deep thinking on platform engineering, MRO data governance, and building software that lasts.

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The 8K Constraint That Made Everything Better

By Raghu Vishwanath, Managing Partner | March 2026 | 8 min read

I had a pipeline that worked.

Not “worked” in the demo sense — worked in production. Real records, real classifications, real accuracy numbers I could defend. Built on a commercial LLM with a generous context window, the kind of runway that lets you be lazy and still get results.

Then I decided to rebuild the whole thing on a local open-source model running on my laptop.

Builder's Log

Notes from 30 years of building software that lasts.

Hands carefully pruning a bonsai tree on a work table — deliberate constraint shaping growth into something more refined than unconstrained nature would produce.

The 8K Constraint That Made Everything Better

A generous context window lets you be lazy and still get results. An 8K token limit forced a 94% reduction...

AI and MRO

What we learned building AI that understands MRO data

Blue marble caves in Patagonia with light selectively illuminating sculpted surfaces while deeper formations remain in shadow — AI that reveals what it can determine and honestly acknowledges what it can't

AI That Knows When It Doesn’t Know

"PART, MISC, FOR PUMP." Every AI vendor classifies this record confidently. That's the problem. The most important thing your AI...

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When AI Meets Three Decades of MRO Knowledge

Same bearing. Same valve. Same gasket. Different intelligence. When AI is built by people who understand what a bearing does...

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Why Generic AI Fails at MRO Data

Your AI vendor's demo was flawless. Then someone asked: "What happens when we feed it our actual data?" We fed...

The Layers — MRO

Lessons from living inside the MRO data problem

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What “Good Enough” Data Actually Looks Like

"We tried the governance route. It didn't stick." I've heard this from more MRO leaders than I can count. They...

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The Math That Maintenance Managers Don’t See

The builder who asks "why" isn't a new invention. Leonardo was one. The cathedral masters were. The architects of Uber's...

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The Layers Don’t Lie

There's a moment in every long project when you realize you've stopped building what you set out to build. We...

Bluemind Thinking

Vision, philosophy, and the future of platform engineering

The Builder Who Asks Why

The builder who asks "why" isn't a new invention. Leonardo was one. The cathedral masters were. The architects of Uber's...

Where Judgment Lives in Code

Philosophy is cheap. Everyone claims to ask "why." Every pitch deck mentions vision. Every engineering team says they care about...

What the GP Sees That the Surgeon Misses

The patient arrives with a persistent rash. The dermatologist examines it carefully. Considers the pattern, the texture, the distribution. Autoimmune...