Tag
Traces, Tempo and the LGTM stack
Wiring Spring Boot 4 + Spring Batch 6 to emit job/step traces into Tempo and spring_batch_* metrics into Prometheus — and the four config traps that each failed the same way: green build, zero errors, nothing exported.
Security and privacy, in practice
RFC 9116 answers the one question a stranger needs answered about your site: who do I tell about a vulnerability. What the file must contain, why the expiry date belongs in a test, and the routing trap that makes an SPA host serve it as HTML at 200.
Security and privacy, in practice
I put an MCP server on the public internet so an AI client could file todos onto my private kanban board. The interesting part wasn't the protocol — it was making the dangerous call unrepresentable.
Security and privacy, in practice
My kanban board had no authentication at all and handed its entire database to any caller. Putting it on focus.zakaria.lu meant a fourth host on the jar that was already running - plus a disclosure bug caught in review, and one cookie dot that 500'd every sign-in.
Building agents on the JVM with Embabel · Part 8
An Embabel blackboard lives and dies with a single agent process. A Context is the thing that outlives it - and because it seeds the blackboard before planning starts, it changes which actions actually run.
Building agents on the JVM with Embabel · Part 6
Turning my JVM agents into MCP tools took one dependency and one annotation. It also took three silent failures -- a starter that suppresses the web server, a shell that eats your CLI flags, and an annotation default that publishes exactly zero tools without telling you.
Building agents on the JVM with Embabel · Part 5
I pointed my Embabel agents at a local Grafana LGTM stack and saw nothing. Three configuration gotchas later, every GOAP planning step, LLM call and tool loop shows up as a span in Tempo. Here is the full walkthrough, with screenshots.
Building agents on the JVM with Embabel · Part 4
In regulated work the dangerous agent is the one that acts without asking. Here's how I made an Embabel agent pause for human approval before moving money -- with the approval built into the type graph, not an if-check.
Building agents on the JVM with Embabel · Part 3
An LLM cannot know a live account balance, and in banking a confidently hallucinated number is a disaster. The fix is a tool. Here's how @LlmTool works in Embabel on the JVM, plus the one API gotcha that cost me a compile.
Building agents on the JVM with Embabel · Part 2
The non-deterministic part of an agent is the LLM. Box it out and the rest is ordinary, deterministic code you can test. Here's how I test Embabel agents on the JVM without spending a single token.