Sam Reghenzi Homepage

The Ontology Was Always a Bounded Context

samreghenzi — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 09:56:00 +0200

Two agents meet in a park.

"I've just had a complaint from a customer," says the first.

"What's a customer?" asks the second.

"Anyone with an account."

A third agent walks over.

"That's not a customer," it says. "A customer is anyone with an active subscription."

The three agents pause …

The Guardrail Is Not in the Model

samreghenzi — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 14:16:00 +0200

Frank Coyle gave a twenty-minute talk at the AI Engineer World's Fair that has been circulating for a few weeks now, and the argument in it is simple enough to state in one sentence: agentic systems need ontologies, because LLMs are probabilistic and probabilistic systems need logical guardrails.

I think …

The Baseline That Refuses to Die

Sam Reghenzi — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 09:30:00 +0200

For a decade, gradient-boosted trees owned tabular machine learning. In the last twelve months tabular foundation models finally — and decisively — beat them on TabArena. But the lesson practitioners are drawing ("stop using trees") is almost the opposite of what the evidence supports, because almost nobody runs the comparison correctly. A field guide to baselines, benchmarking discipline, and the GPU crunch in 2026.

Hardware Ate Software. But the Survivors Become Agents

Sam Reghenzi — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 09:30:00 +0200

A response to "Software Ate the World, Now Hardware Is Eating Software." The diagnosis is right — value is migrating and point software is being crushed. The prognosis is wrong. When the bottom of the stack commoditizes, value doesn't stay there. It climbs back up to the layer the thesis forgot: the agent.

OAuth's Original Sin: Why MCP Inherited a Problem Designed for Humans

Sam Reghenzi — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 22:48:00 +0200

The third post in the MCP series. The first two argued when MCP wins and loses. This one looks at the terrain MCP is supposed to win on — OAuth-bound integrations — and shows why even there, the ground is more fragile than it looks.

Skills vs MCP Servers: The Hidden Cost of Tools in LLM Workflows

Sam Reghenzi — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0200

Why CLI-based skills are often cheaper, safer, and more ergonomic than MCP servers — and the one case where MCP genuinely wins.

MCP vs Skills: when to use which in professional LLM-assisted coding

samreghenzi — Sun, 10 May 2026 22:48:00 +0200

Anyone who has spent years doing systems integration immediately understands the appeal of MCP. The dream in this field has always been the same: a clean contract between systems, where every method is described, every parameter is typed, every response is predictable. No more 80-page PDFs read half-heartedly, no more …

Running Gemma 4 31B on an Apple Silicon Mac with Ollama

samreghenzi — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 22:48:00 +0200

A practical configuration for a 32 GB M5 Mac that still needs to remain usable

Running large language models locally has become surprisingly practical on Apple Silicon. With a modern Mac, Ollama, and a carefully quantized GGUF model, it is possible to run models that only a short time ago …

Giving voice to Italian energy markets with artificial intelligence

samreghenzi — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 22:48:00 +0200

How an MCP server turns electricity exchange data into natural conversations

The Italian electricity market produces an enormous amount of data every day: hourly prices by zone, traded volumes, liquidity, the PUN (Prezzo Unico Nazionale — the national single price). Essential data for traders, energy analysts, industry journalists, and companies operating …

Stop Putting Secrets in Your Repo. Seriously.

samreghenzi — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 22:48:00 +0100

OK. We've all been there. You're setting up a new microservice, you need a database connection string, a Keycloak client secret, an OCIR auth token — and before you know it, you're copy-pasting credentials into a .tfvars file and telling yourself "I'll fix this later".

Later never comes. Until it does …

Forecasting Time Series from a COVID-19 Red Zone

samreghenzi — Fri, 17 Apr 2020 22:48:00 +0200

Hello, dear citizen of the free world. I’m writing while I’m in a restricted lifestyle. On Monday night Italy’s prime minister decided that the entire country would be covered by restrictions that can be summarised as follows:

“I stay at home”

All travel was banned unless justified …

I will ride like a gentlemen

samreghenzi — Mon, 17 Apr 2017 22:48:00 +0200

I will ride like a gentlemen

On September 24th I will ride in the Distinguished Gentlemen Ride

This is me an my bike at a recent Ducati Scrambler event

As a rider of a stylish Ducati Scrambler, I will join my local chapter of the DGR. It is a retro-themed …