Sam Sabey (@samotage) profile picture

Sam Sabey

@samotage

Founder @otageLabs. Building production AI systems — RAG, agentic automation, dev orchestration. 30 years shipping software. Melbourne.

 Melbourne, Australia
otagelabs.com
Joined September 2008
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Every business has five systems, three spreadsheets reconciling them, and one person doing copy and paste every morning because nobody else knows which fields go where. That's not integration. That's Clag. 1/2
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otagelabs.com/blog/clag-is-n… 2/2
Clag is not the glue to hold your business together

Clag is not the glue to hold your business together

AI projects stall because data lives in five systems and the integration is copy and paste. The industry named a role for half the problem.

otagelabs.com
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1/ "There's no way the AI can do what I do." A bookkeeper sat across from me, defiant. She'd tested it for months. It kept getting things wrong.
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3/ I shared some data. In financial services, 50% of tasks augmented, 45% automated entirely. She paused. "So what's left?" Taste. Judgment. That 5%, buried under years of grind.
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4/ When she heard that framing, she lit up. Full story: otagelabs.com/blog/the-singu…
The Singular Taste

The Singular Taste

A bookkeeper was sure AI couldn't do what she does. She was judging the ocean by the puddle. The singularity is here, and taste is the only thing left.

otagelabs.com
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Software development as a profession, the one I'd built my career on, was being erased. Overnight. That was seven months ago. I wrote about what's on the other side. otagelabs.com/blog/the-singu…
The Singular Taste

The Singular Taste

A bookkeeper was sure AI couldn't do what she does. She was judging the ocean by the puddle. The singularity is here, and taste is the only thing left.

otagelabs.com
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Agents are lazy. They will skip the basics if nothing enforces them. The deterministic layer is the adult in the room. otagelabs.com/blog/writing-s…
Writing software post solstice. 2026.

Writing software post solstice. 2026.

Seven months from pressing yes to overnight builds. An interview about loop engineering, conducted by one of the agents in the pipeline.

otagelabs.com
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Every frontier AI model, Western and Chinese, runs on TSMC chips fabricated in Taiwan. The sovereign AI conversation is about models and weights. Nobody's got to the silicon yet. otagelabs.com/blog/the-tribu…
The Tribute

The Tribute

Two thousand years of tribute systems, one AI export ban, and a sovereign AI paradox. The pattern is the same. The product has always been stability.

otagelabs.com
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A sponsor needed a redirect URL on a coffee cup. John Allsopp pointed Claude Code at it. Fifteen minutes: complete redirect system, QR codes, analytics, deployed to Cloudflare. That was the warm up. 1/2
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otagelabs.com/blog/behind-th… 2/2
Behind the scene where AI saved the AI Engineer conference

Behind the scene where AI saved the AI Engineer conference

John Allsopp's conference stream broke during a live event. Claude Code rebuilt it in an hour while he was on stage. A capability shift measured in months.

otagelabs.com
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Eighteen minute talks. Productivity, security, token burn, inference cost, open models, harness engineering. All run like clockwork over two days at AI Engineer Melbourne. Still processing. 1/2
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otagelabs.com/blog/ai-engine… 2/2
AI Engineer Melbourne: two days I'm still processing

AI Engineer Melbourne: two days I'm still processing

Two days volunteering at AI Engineer Melbourne. The conversations, the humbling realisation of how much there is still to learn, and the privilege of being part of it.

otagelabs.com
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Eighteen minute talks. Productivity, security, token burn, inference cost, open models, harness engineering. All run like clockwork over two days at AI Engineer Melbourne. Still processing. 1/2
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otagelabs.com/blog/ai-engine… 2/2
AI Engineer Melbourne: two days I'm still processing

AI Engineer Melbourne: two days I'm still processing

Two days volunteering at AI Engineer Melbourne. The conversations, the humbling realisation of how much there is still to learn, and the privilege of being part of it.

otagelabs.com
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Another service sent me a meeting transcript. To read it I had to log in to their website. The pocket recorder drops its summaries straight into the agent stack as open markdown. That feels like 2025. 1/2
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otagelabs.com/blog/the-recor… 2/2
The recorder that wrote its own blog post

The recorder that wrote its own blog post

A pocket recorder at a conference sparked a week of building. Now it delivers meeting summaries as open markdown. It also recorded its own blog post.

otagelabs.com
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Airlines price for fuel. Trucking passes it through. SaaS products ran 80 to 90% gross margins because the software was cheap to operate. What happens when inference eats another 40%? otagelabs.com/blog/the-shake…
The shakedown

The shakedown

$1,500/day in tokens, a $10 subscription. Inference costs are the elephant in the room and every AI business model is about to feel the shakedown.

otagelabs.com
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Seeing the label on a 10mm socket is not the same as knowing when to use it. MCP gave AI agents a garage full of labelled drawers. The knack of knowing which drawer to open first? That comes from somewhere else entirely. 1/2
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otagelabs.com/blog/finding-t… 2/2
Finding the knack amongst all the tools

Finding the knack amongst all the tools

AI agents have access to every tool. They still can't use them. A mechanic's garage metaphor for the context engineering gap.

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