A quiet control room supervising an unattended AI agent workflow

How to Build Real Trust in Unattended AI Agents That Act

Suppose you actually have one now — an agent that takes a job end to end. Pulls the data, writes the code, runs the tests, opens the PR, updates the docs. It doesn’t need you feeding it prompts line by line. You hand it the task at night and go to sleep. The real question isn’t whether it finishes. In coding, research, and content workflows, model capability is often already sufficient to produce a plausible result. That does not mean capability has stopped mattering everywhere: in unfamiliar domains and genuinely novel tasks, it can still be the limiting factor. But once an agent is capable enough to act, a different bottleneck appears — ...

July 15, 2026 · 24 min · 5027 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me
A personal intelligence pipeline connecting monitored sources to evidence, judgment, and action

Build a Personal Intelligence System That Leads to Action

The quiet dashboard can be the dangerous one A morning briefing with no new items may mean that nothing relevant happened. It may also mean an RSS route broke, an API began returning empty pages, or a credential expired during the night. From the reader’s side, those very different states look identical: silence. That is the first lesson of a personal intelligence system. Gathering more information is easy to demonstrate; knowing whether the machine is healthy, whether its summaries are faithful, and whether a signal deserves action is the real work. The system I want is not an account that publishes automatically. It is a pipeline that can show me what changed, why it may matter, what evidence supports the claim, and which decision—if any—should follow. ...

July 15, 2026 · 12 min · 2452 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me
An AI news pipeline reaching the boundary between automation and human judgment

AI News Pipelines: Automation Limits and Human Judgment

Suppose you ask an AI system to track one field — papers, releases, benchmarks, first-party changelogs, and the conversations around them. How far can it get on your behalf? This essay is not a census of every product. It is a field note from the systems I tested between January and June 2026, across AI research and developer-tool sources. In that sample, three patterns kept recurring: subscription aggregation, change monitoring, and agentic search. They were capable, but they shared a boundary: automation can haul information remarkably well; without your goals, context, and feedback, it cannot reliably make the final judgment for you. ...

July 15, 2026 · 17 min · 3431 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me
Blank cards passing through a wooden ranking staircase toward a reader

LLM Recommendation Systems: Retrieval, Ranking, RAG, and Evaluation

Recommendation systems create a tempting illusion: the newer the model, the more advanced the system. Anyone who has operated one knows that the model is only the part above water. Below it sit exposure bias, latency budgets, feature freshness, inventory constraints, exploration risk, and counterfactual evaluation. Large language models add a useful semantic layer, but they do not make those older problems disappear. They also introduce new ones: higher cost, variable output, and explanations that can sound persuasive without reflecting the reasons an item was ranked. ...

April 23, 2025 · 18 min · 3653 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me
Several model pipelines converge at an AI Gateway where cost and governance are weighed

AI Gateway Guide: LiteLLM, Kong, APISIX, Cloudflare, or Portkey?

An AI Gateway is not merely a reverse proxy placed in front of a language model. Once an application reaches production, every model call carries several kinds of uncertainty at once: long-lived streaming connections, token-based billing, provider quotas, sensitive inputs, changing model behavior, and outputs that cannot be trusted by default. A conventional API gateway can handle part of this traffic. It may authenticate clients, terminate TLS, enforce request limits, and route HTTP requests. It does not automatically answer the questions that matter most to an AI product: ...

April 16, 2025 · 16 min · 3223 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me
From 2024 AI field notes to a reliable production RAG system

2024 AI Field Notes, Reassessed: From Emergence to Production RAG

This article began as notes from a large-language-model meetup in January 2024. Back then, the question was what a model could do. Two years later, the harder question is why anyone should trust the system around it. I have not polished the old notes into a story in which every early judgment was right. Mistakes are useful sediment. They remind us that a technical opinion is not a prophecy; it is a bet with an expiry date. Each section therefore keeps the 2024 observation and adds a 2026 reassessment: still true, changed, or wrong at the time. ...

January 14, 2024 · 11 min · 2234 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me

Deployment and Design of Management Backend and Monitoring

OpenIM offers various flexible deployment options to suit different environments and requirements. Here is a simplified and optimized description of these deployment options: Source Code Deployment: Regular Source Code Deployment: Deployment using the nohup method. This is a basic deployment method suitable for development and testing environments. For details, refer to the Regular Source Code Deployment Guide . Production-Level Deployment: Deployment using the system method, more suitable for production environments. This method provides higher stability and reliability. For details, refer to the Production-Level Deployment Guide . Cluster Deployment: Kubernetes Deployment: Provides two deployment methods, including deployment through Helm and sealos. This is suitable for environments that require high availability and scalability. Specific methods can be found in the Kubernetes Deployment Guide . Docker Deployment: Regular Docker Deployment: Suitable for quick deployments and small projects. For detailed information, refer to the Docker Deployment Guide . Docker Compose Deployment: Provides more convenient service management and configuration, suitable for complex multi-container applications. Next, we will introduce the specific steps, monitoring, and management backend configuration for each of these deployment methods, as well as usage tips to help you choose the most suitable deployment option according to your needs. ...

November 15, 2023 · 7 min · 1401 words · Xinwei Xiong, Me