Ernest Mikhail

Predicting groceries with statistics, not AI

I shipped a free iOS app that predicts when Australian groceries hit half price — from a Windows laptop, on $0/month of infrastructure. What survived contact with real data: honesty as architecture, a marketplace junk purge, and a launch-week incident where every component worked.

Why I ripped free-form LLM codegen out of my migration pipeline

Building a multi-agent PHP-to-Laravel migrator, I rewrote the generation layer twice. The second pass stopped asking the LLM to write structural code — and got faster, cheaper, and more reliable for it.