📓 The Builder Notebook
A record of how real systems get built.
Architecture, AI in production, hard-won lessons. One deep-dive a month, plus shorter notes between.
By Ahmed Kammorah — Senior SWE at Amazon · 16-year builder across 7 ventures (Waffy, Signalia, ReUp.Energy, NovaDentX, FounderYX, Mainline, +1 stealth).
Latest writing
All posts →Note: hiring your first engineer when you're the founder-CTO
Three rules I wish I'd had at Waffy on day zero. Short version: don't hire the engineer who can do everything; hire the one whose first 12 weeks de-risk the things you can't.
Most AI agents are just expensive for-loops
What actually works in production AI doesn't look like the demos. Three patterns from running AI in fintech, news intelligence, and operations — and the agentic pattern none of them use.
How we architected Waffy's multi-party escrow settlement engine
v1 was a single-table state machine. v3 routes 9 transaction types through a deterministic settlement core with an AI fraud subsystem. Here's what broke between them, and what survived.