The Lab

Where I build, break, and figure things out

The Lab is my personal AI engineering workspace — a collection of experiments, systems, and tools I'm actively building or have shipped. Everything here is real work, not demos.

Current focus

What I'm actively working on right now.

In progress

Multi-agent orchestration framework

Building a lightweight orchestration layer for coordinating specialised sub-agents — planner, researcher, writer, critic — with shared memory and structured handoffs.

In progress

RAG pipeline with hybrid retrieval

Combining dense vector search with BM25 keyword retrieval and a cross-encoder reranker. Testing on a private document corpus to benchmark retrieval quality.

Shipping soon

MCP server for internal tooling

Exposing internal tools — calendar, task manager, knowledge base — to LLMs via the Model Context Protocol. Goal: a personal AI assistant with real context.

How I work

Ship early, eval often

I'd rather have a working v0.1 with evals than a perfect v1 that ships in six months. Evaluation frameworks go in before features do.

Build to understand

Reading papers and watching lectures only sticks when I follow up with a working implementation. Every concept on this site has been through that filter.

Document the failures

The interesting stuff is usually what didn't work. I try to write up failures as honestly as successes — that's where the real learning is.

Follow the work

I write about what I'm building in the Engineering Journal — architecture decisions, experiments, and lessons from shipping AI systems.

JoeCairns.AI

Building AI agents, automation workflows, and MCP servers — and documenting every lesson learned along the way.

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Building AI that actually works

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