https://www.couch.cx/writing Michael Couch — Strategy + Architect + Builder. Technology strategy, agentic AI, case studies, and long-form work. The canonical feed for Michael Couch on the open web. en-us michael@couch.cx (Michael Couch) michael@couch.cx (Michael Couch) Sun, 26 Apr 2026 09:58:51 GMT 360 https://www.couch.cx/og-image.png https://www.couch.cx/writing https://www.couch.cx/writing/why-couch-cx-public-writing https://www.couch.cx/writing/why-couch-cx-public-writing Tue, 28 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT Michael Couch (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrmcouch) Why a canonical writing surface on the open web: owned narrative, compounding trust, and a spec that humans and systems can read—tied to agentic infrastructure, not to someone else’s feed. https://www.couch.cx/writing/ship-the-note-essays-as-proof https://www.couch.cx/writing/ship-the-note-essays-as-proof Tue, 28 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT Michael Couch (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrmcouch) What publishing on-site does for the build: proof, case studies, and the Strategy–Architect–Builder loop—with receipts that back the rest of the site. https://www.couch.cx/writing/design-md-stitch-and-brand-velocity https://www.couch.cx/writing/design-md-stitch-and-brand-velocity Sun, 26 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT Michael Couch (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrmcouch) Google’s DESIGN.md, Brand Lockup, rule-governed rendering, Stitch as a validation surface, Creative Patterns on paid social—and a blunt take: when pixels go cheap, own the spec, the audit, and the infrastructure that says no when models step out of bounds. https://www.couch.cx/writing/build-skills-not-agent-armies https://www.couch.cx/writing/build-skills-not-agent-armies Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT Michael Couch (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrmcouch) Agent swarms look like progress until you inherit a second org chart of prompts, retries, and debug sessions. A SCQA-grounded take: invest in reusable, testable skills first—then let a thinner agent layer coordinate. How Anthropic's Agent Skills framing maps to safer, cheaper operations. https://www.couch.cx/writing/personal-llm-knowledge-bases https://www.couch.cx/writing/personal-llm-knowledge-bases Mon, 20 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT Michael Couch (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrmcouch) Karpathy's LLM wiki pattern turns reading into a compounding asset—not dead bookmarks. A five-move framework for ingest, compile, operate, reinvest, and hygiene—plus where PageStash substitutes for Obsidian Web Clipper on the web-to-structured-text path. https://www.couch.cx/writing/n8n-agentic-operations https://www.couch.cx/writing/n8n-agentic-operations Sun, 22 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT Michael Couch (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrmcouch) The fastest path to agentic ops for most organizations is not another bespoke model—it is workflow automation that wraps LLMs in guardrails, legacy integration, and audit-friendly steps. How n8n maps to corporate innovation, operating companies, and social enterprises—grounded in current production practice. https://www.couch.cx/writing/langgraph-operations-at-scale https://www.couch.cx/writing/langgraph-operations-at-scale Sun, 22 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT Michael Couch (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrmcouch) When agents touch money, liability, or compliance, demo-grade scripts fail. LangGraph's checkpointers, interrupts, and LangSmith traces are how innovation labs and lean enterprises ship operations that survive restarts, audits, and humans in the loop. https://www.couch.cx/writing/end-monolithic-product-org https://www.couch.cx/writing/end-monolithic-product-org Thu, 19 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT Michael Couch (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrmcouch) We broke monolithic code into services and sharpened boundaries with DDD. The bottleneck moved to the center. AI compresses build cost—so decentralized delivery with real governance beats one product org gating every workflow. https://www.couch.cx/writing/karpathy-autoresearch-pattern https://www.couch.cx/writing/karpathy-autoresearch-pattern Wed, 18 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT Michael Couch (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrmcouch) Andrej Karpathy's autoresearch hit 30K stars in a week. The program.md pattern—humans set goals, agents run experiments overnight—generalizes beyond ML to any domain with measurable objectives. Leaders adopt it now. https://www.couch.cx/writing/enterprise-auto-research https://www.couch.cx/writing/enterprise-auto-research Wed, 18 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT Michael Couch (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrmcouch) EDR, DOVA, and the shift from single-agent loops to multi-agent orchestration. Enterprise deep research—plan, search, synthesize, deliver—is here. The organizations that deploy it first own the information advantage. https://www.couch.cx/writing/nvidia-enterprise-full-stack https://www.couch.cx/writing/nvidia-enterprise-full-stack Tue, 17 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT Michael Couch (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrmcouch) At GTC 2026, Jensen Huang announced a thesis: every enterprise must own its AI stack—and the best economics come when that stack is NVIDIA, end to end. GPT-OSS on NIM, NemoClaw, and the five-layer cake. https://www.couch.cx/writing/stop-wasting-my-tokens https://www.couch.cx/writing/stop-wasting-my-tokens Sat, 07 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT Michael Couch (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrmcouch) Tokens are the currency of the Agentic era. Learn why "polite" LLM filler is a tax on your latency, your margin, and your intelligence-density. https://www.couch.cx/writing/high-density-agentic-payloads https://www.couch.cx/writing/high-density-agentic-payloads Sat, 07 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT Michael Couch (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrmcouch) Formatting overhead is structural waste. Explore how TOON and structured Markdown maximize entropy in your agent-to-agent swarms. https://www.couch.cx/writing/the-efficiency-of-hostility https://www.couch.cx/writing/the-efficiency-of-hostility Sat, 07 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT Michael Couch (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrmcouch) LLMs aren’t human. They don't have feelings. But they do have semantic pathways triggered by high-stakes emotional language. Here is why being a "dick" actually gets you better results. https://www.couch.cx/writing/beyond-agile-the-micro-team https://www.couch.cx/writing/beyond-agile-the-micro-team Thu, 05 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT Michael Couch (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrmcouch) Agile was built to manage the friction between idea and delivery. When AI collapses that friction to zero, the methodology becomes the bottleneck. https://www.couch.cx/writing/smb-automation-arbitrage https://www.couch.cx/writing/smb-automation-arbitrage Thu, 05 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT Michael Couch (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrmcouch) Why the real winners of the agentic revolution aren't enterprises, but agile small businesses rewiring their operations. https://www.couch.cx/writing/the-fractional-digital-employee https://www.couch.cx/writing/the-fractional-digital-employee Thu, 05 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT Michael Couch (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrmcouch) Stop treating automation as an IT project. Treat it as a hire. How small businesses are reclaiming hours. https://www.couch.cx/writing/agentic-frameworks-2026 https://www.couch.cx/writing/agentic-frameworks-2026 Fri, 27 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT Michael Couch (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrmcouch) Engineering advice for companies choosing between LangGraph, CrewAI, Pydantic AI, and the managed walled gardens. https://www.couch.cx/writing/defensive-agents-adoption https://www.couch.cx/writing/defensive-agents-adoption Wed, 25 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT Michael Couch (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrmcouch) The rise of the defensive layer: how model providers are leveraging AI-powered anxiety to drive enterprise adoption. https://www.couch.cx/writing/hedging-with-open-source https://www.couch.cx/writing/hedging-with-open-source Tue, 24 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT Michael Couch (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrmcouch) Avoiding the walled gardens: why local models and enriched open-source data are the secret to scalable agentic systems. https://www.couch.cx/writing/agentic-marketing-end-of-funnel https://www.couch.cx/writing/agentic-marketing-end-of-funnel Tue, 24 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT Michael Couch (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrmcouch) When the buyer is an agent, the marketing funnel collapses into a data-driven satisfiability problem. https://www.couch.cx/writing/the-role-of-personal-agents https://www.couch.cx/writing/the-role-of-personal-agents Tue, 24 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT Michael Couch (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrmcouch) From static UIs to intent-driven swarms: the shifting landscape of how we delegate our lives to machines. https://www.couch.cx/writing/why-agentic-infrastructure https://www.couch.cx/writing/why-agentic-infrastructure Sun, 01 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT Michael Couch (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrmcouch) The pattern across Siren, Skydio, Swan, and Webflow: systems that scale intelligence and autonomy. https://www.couch.cx/writing/the-agentic-enterprise https://www.couch.cx/writing/the-agentic-enterprise Sun, 01 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT Michael Couch (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrmcouch) What Dreamforce 2025 made clear: the divide is accelerating, and brand authenticity is the defensible moat. https://www.couch.cx/writing/design-systems-as-code https://www.couch.cx/writing/design-systems-as-code Sun, 01 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT Michael Couch (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrmcouch) Advertising creatives shouldn't fight tools. They should have systems that behave like code. https://www.couch.cx/writing/brand-lockup-case-study https://www.couch.cx/writing/brand-lockup-case-study Sun, 01 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT Michael Couch (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrmcouch) Problem, approach, outcome — how we built design systems that behave like code. https://www.couch.cx/writing/threatbase-case-study https://www.couch.cx/writing/threatbase-case-study Sun, 01 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT Michael Couch (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrmcouch) Scaling open-source intelligence with agentic workflows — what we built and why. https://www.couch.cx/writing/pagestash-case-study https://www.couch.cx/writing/pagestash-case-study Sun, 01 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT Michael Couch (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrmcouch) Turning the web into a queryable knowledge layer for research and intelligence.