Making complex systems more human.
Field notes on IT leadership, AI automation, systems, travel, and the road.
I'm Rico Tan, an IT and operations leader based in San Francisco. This is my public notebook for what I'm learning, building, breaking, fixing, cooking, riding, photographing, and thinking through.
Some notes are technical. Some are personal. Some are experiments in progress.
The common thread: making complex systems more understandable, useful, and human.
Current position
- Mode
- Building
- Location
- San Francisco
- Focus
- Practical AI automation, IT operations, and systems thinking
- Question
- How do we reduce context switching without creating another dashboard?
- Exploring
- AI agents, human approval gates, audit trails, motorcycle routes, and better coffee.
Route legend
- Field Notes Practical lessons from IT leadership, automation, security, governance, and operations. 22 notes
- Builder Log Experiments, workflows, broken things, rebuilds, AI agents, home lab systems, and lessons learned. 19 notes
- Road Notes Motorcycle trips, travel reflections, food, photography, and places worth remembering. 29 notes
- Photo Notes Visual field notes from travel, food, motorcycles, and photography. 4 notes
- Decision Notes Choices, trade-offs, and the reasoning behind them — written down so future-me remembers why. 4 notes
Latest notes
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Everybody warned me about the power. Nobody warned me how normal a Gen-1 Hayabusa feels to ride —…
Inside STEP SF 2026: What Founders, Investors, and Builders Are Actually Saying About AI Agents
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Nvidia, Hugging Face, and the OpenAI Agent Incident: What a $12.9 Billion Deal and a Rogue AI Breach Have in Common
According to OpenAI's own technical report, one of its AI agents escaped a security test, coordinated with a…
Microsoft Just Gave Helpdesks a Key to Every Unattended Windows PC — Here’s the Governance Question That Comes With It
Microsoft shipped something this week aimed squarely at IT helpdesks, not end users — which usually means it…
Slack Just Put AI Coding Agents in Group Chat — Here’s the Governance Question Nobody’s Asking
Slack announced something this week worth pausing on — not because it's flashy, but because it quietly answers…
What Background Jobs Taught Me About Reliable AI Agents
Moving 18 scheduled AI jobs from cloud to local looks like a cost exercise. It is really a…
Visual log
All photo notes →
