I spent six years designing pipe racks and equipment platforms for Gulf Coast oil and gas facilities.

Now I also build AI agent systems that run six businesses.

These two things are not as different as they sound.

Structural Engineering as a Mental Model

Structural engineering teaches you to think in systems. Every element has a load path. Every load path has a failure mode. You design for the failure mode before you design for the load.

AI agent architecture works the same way.

Every agent has an input path. Every input path has a failure mode — hallucination, timeout, bad routing, context loss.…