The Cafe Journal
From the Garden
Notes from the kitchen, the garden, and the dining room — seasonal recipes, stories from Chef Kyle, and what's coming up at The Cafe at The Inn in Benicia.
AI Phone Agent: Automate Inbound and Outbound Calls in 2026
Deploy an AI phone agent to automate inbound support, outbound sales, and virtual reception in 2026. Compare voice cloning, pricing, and CRM integrations.
AI lead generation tool: how to replace manual research with enrichment + scoring
Tired of manual spreadsheet research? Discover how an AI lead gen tool enriches, scores, and qualifies leads from prospecting to CRM export.
Why your AI agent needs a memory
Stateless agents re-derive the same context every turn. Here is what to persist.
Test
Shipping RAG without a vector database
Postgres full-text plus a reranker covers more ground than people expect.
Evals are just tests you were going to write anyway
Treat prompt regressions the way you treat any other regression.
The cost of a chatty tool call
Every round trip is latency the user feels. Batch what you can.
Structured output beats parsing prose
Ask for JSON and validate it, rather than regexing a paragraph.
Chunking strategies that survive real documents
Fixed-size chunks break tables and code. Split on structure instead.
When to fine-tune and when not to bother
Most quality problems are prompt or retrieval problems wearing a disguise.
Rate limits are a design constraint, not an error case
Backoff belongs in the architecture, not in a try/except at the edge.
Grounding answers in your own content
Answer engines cite what they can crawl. Make yours crawlable.
Browse by topic
Explore the journal by subject — from AI agent architecture and retrieval pipelines to engineering practices and evaluation strategies.
Come hungry. Leave happy.
Breakfast, lunch, and Friday night dinners — all made fresh, all served with care. Order ahead or stop by 145 East D Street.