Over the past 4 years I’ve been building with AI and using it in products. I share my experience in long-form posts on this blog but there’s a lot that doesn’t make the cut. Plus, I read much more than I write and there are very interesting insights I would love to share.
The solution: a new newsletter but not like any other: say hello to ai5nines!
ai5nines is a low-frequency high signal/noise ratio newsletter focusing on:
✅ AI Operational Reliability: running systems that have AI components (e.g. LLM/SLM, image generation, agents, workflows) with resilience, robustness, predictability and observability.
✅ AI Alignment & Safety: bridging the gap between theoretical alignment and practical implementation, including AI safety and reducing cost of failures.
✅ AI Security: protecting the expanded attack surface of AI applications, from hardening the runtime to mitigating prompt injection and data poisoning/leaks and action hijacking.
❌ Out of scope: long form posts (we have key takeaways with links to source), drama (e.g. Google firing their AI safety team), marketing (e.g. new model releases or benchmarks), hype (I’ll only share what I believe to be legit), AI generated content, generic SRE/architecture/platform engineering content (it has to be AI related to make the cut).
What’s up with the name?
The “AI” part is obvious but the “5 nines” part is a short hand for 99.999% service level objective (SLO). The idea is to communicate the scope as:
AI services that are highly available, reliable, aligned and safe.
As a subscriber to this blog, you should get a welcome email shortly. If it’s not for you, simply unsubscribe. But if you decide to stay, here’s my commitment to you:
100% Human: Curated, vetted, and written entirely by an engineer. AI is the subject of this newsletter. The curation is manual.
Actionable: Every takeaway maps directly to production safety and operational resilience. Zero general AI hype.
Max 5 Links, No Fixed Cadence: Quality drives quantity. I only send an issue when there are exactly five critical links that are worth your attention.
Zero-Friction Reading: Each link includes the core failure mode and a concrete takeaway. You extract the engineering value instantly, even without clicking.
No Inbox Rules: Treat this as a primary alert. Read it in your main inbox. Do not route it to a “Read Later” folder to gather dust. If I breach my commitment, unsubscribe instead of sending it next to other newsletters to gather dust.
Great initiative Alex, looking forward for the first issue!