Doug Campos

Hi, I'm Doug Campos. Engineering Manager, open source enthusiast, and occasional speaker. This is where I share thoughts, notes, and things I've learned.

More about me →

Recent Posts

  • Two contrasting scenes: on the left a figure manually assembles a robot with scattered tools in cool grays, on the right a robot calmly self-organizes its own tools in warm gold and sage green tones

    Skills That Write Themselves

    Last week I wrote about Pi’s four-tool constraint and Mario Zechner’s philosophy of radical minimalism. But here’s the obvious question: how do you do anything useful with just read, write,...

  • Messy filing cabinet transforming into a neatly ranked stack of documents

    How Computers Find Words

    Every search engine you’ve ever used runs on an algorithm from 1994. Google, DuckDuckGo, the search bar in your email client - underneath all the machine learning, there’s a formula...

  • Cluttered spaceship cockpit with overwhelming controls contrasted with a clean minimal workbench holding just four simple tools

    Four Tools and a Lobster

    You might have heard of OpenClaw — the open-source AI assistant running on everything from WhatsApp to a Raspberry Pi, mass adoption, mass controversy. What powers it is a tiny...

  • A massive ornate wrought-iron gate with circuit board patterns slowly closing, warm golden light spilling through the narrowing gap from a collaborative coding community beyond

    The Closing Gates of Open Source

    I tried to contribute a fix to beads_viewer recently. Found a real bug where a hardcoded path should have used a stored variable, wrote up a clean fix, and submitted...

  • Escaping the Dumb Zone with RLMs

    Back in October I wrote about small models being the future. The thesis: you don’t need a trillion parameters for most tasks. I want to get to a point where...

  • Compression Is Not Enough: The Journey Matters

    A few weeks ago I wrote about context engineering and RPI after watching Dex Horthy’s talk. My colleague Pierre-Luc Godin (PL) read it and wanted to dig into one point....

  • Nixifying Local LLMs: Promoting GGUF Models to Nix Derivations

    Local LLM models are huge. Multi-gigabyte files scattered across default cache folders, downloaded separately on every machine, with no integrity verification. It drove me nuts. If I’m going to commit...

  • First Mover Advantage Isn't Enough

    Good ideas don’t build strong businesses. Execution does. Sometimes all you need is an initial implementation for someone else to come along, learn from your mistakes, and win. Having the...

  • On Beads, Bloat, and Breaking Points

    Beads changed how I think about agentic workflows. The concept is genuinely revolutionary - persistent memory for coding agents that survives context compaction, dependency graphs, task tracking that actually works...

  • The Dog Ate My AI-Generated Code

    I watched Dex’s talk on context engineering at AI Engineer World’s Fair, and it gave a name to something I’ve been experiencing for months. You know that feeling when you’re...