May 5, 20261 MIN READ0 VIEWS
Designing an AI Engineering Lab
Why every senior engineer should run their own private lab — and the architecture I use for mine.
aiarchitecturetooling
Designing an AI Engineering Lab
A personal lab is the single highest-leverage thing a senior engineer can build. It's where ideas get tested, components get hardened, and you stop renting your tooling from someone else.
Three pillars
- Reproducibility — every experiment is a single command away from running again.
- Observability — if you can't see it, you can't improve it. Logs, traces, evals everywhere.
- Composability — small, sharp tools you can wire together in new ways.
My current stack
- Runtime — Node 22, Bun for scripts
- Data — SQLite for everything that doesn't need more
- AI — local models via Ollama, hosted via OpenRouter, evals in custom harness
- UI — Next.js + React Three Fiber for visualizing it all
The lab is never finished. That's the point.
// CONVERSATION