Gary Berger
A Field CTO Perspective
Notes on networks, distributed systems and automation, from the customer side of the architecture.
Latest

Inside the AI Harness: The Substrate Around the Chat
In 2026, what an AI agent can actually do depends less on the model and more on the software wrapped around it. That wrapper is the harness.
Continue reading →All writing
Inside the AI Harness: The Substrate Around the Chat
In 2026, what an AI agent can actually do depends less on the model and more on the software wrapped around it. That wrapper is the harness.
The Rules Nobody Wrote Down
For twenty years, good software depended on people remembering which parts of a program were allowed to talk to which. AI coding tools don't remember. So the rule has to be written down where a machine can enforce it.
The deterministic half of neuro-symbolic AI already exists. It's called network verification.
Everybody’s suddenly got a take on neuro-symbolic AI. Inference for pattern recognition, symbolic logic paired in for reasoning you can actually trust, and the EU AI …
Delivering APIs for AI
The rise of AI agents and autonomous systems is fundamentally changing how we design and deliver APIs, shifting from human-centric interfaces to AI-native integration patterns that …
Breaking the Capability Trap
Network change is one of the riskiest things an enterprise does to itself. A systems view of why change controls backfire, and how pre-change simulation breaks the failure loop.
A brief look at Network Automation
There is an incredible amount of hype these days discussing automation especially in the realm of networking. Some would say that this is relatively new but I would argue that we …
Monitoring the Control Plane
Primer Within every customer, provider and transport network, there exists a host of applications that collect, disseminate and make decisions so that application services can …
Facebook Fabric Networking Deconstructed
Facebook engineering has recently introduced their next-generation data center network architecture planned to be operational in the new Altoona facility. Introducing data center …
Focus areas