About

I'm Casey MacPhee — a Staff Engineer at Liberate, where I work on production AI agent systems for high-stakes workflows. My day job is building agents that have to be right, auditable, and reliable enough to run against real business consequences.

Before Liberate, I spent years in backend and platform engineering — the kind of work where you learn that the interesting problems aren't in the demo, they're in what happens at 2am when the system hits an edge case nobody anticipated. That mindset is what drew me to agent systems: they're the most interesting distributed systems problem in software right now, and most of the field is still pretending the hard parts don't exist.

I write here about the parts that actually matter — reliability, observability, architecture patterns for agents that need to survive contact with production. Not opinions about where AI is headed. Things I built, things that broke, and what I'd do differently.

I live in Boise with my family. When I'm not writing code or essays, I'm usually on a trail somewhere in the Idaho foothills. The outdoors isn't a brand aesthetic — it's just where I go to think.