About Cirrusly Clever
Cirrusly Clever exists because the world is changing and I wanted to change with it. Many years ago, before I worked at AWS and before it was the massive company it is today, I saw that "cloud" was changing my industry. In my actual job, my company at the time was rather skeptical of cloud and specifically of AWS. They were too new and there was no possible chance they could be trusted for real production.
But I was determined to learn, and improve myself. I started watching YouTube videos, joining subreddits, started building simple websites in AWS, actually messaged with Ryan Kroonenburg and his brother Sam of acloudguru fame in the summer of 2015. They had just started their site and I originally took their course through Udemy for like $19.99 at the time.
Well, time has proven that "cloud" overall and AWS specifically can certainly be trusted for production and in fact, is likely the best place to invent.
A few years ago, another shock wave hit my industry: GenAI. For sure, AI and Machine Learning has been around a long time, and was building more and more practical and useful design patterns. Luckily where I work is not anti-AI at all, and in fact they are quite busy building their own FMs, specific AI security approaches, and even Agentic deployment strategies. But, personally, I don't get to build a lot with AI. I can take all the training courses, pass all the certifications, but that still won't be the same as building something.
So rather than treating AI systems as black boxes, I've been exploring them. I've been having fun with some large language models by putting them side by side and asking the same questions of each. Many of the projects here are built specifically to compare different providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, etc) and different classes of models within them. Not just to see which one produces the "right results" but also for tone, behavior, latency, and failure modes. Building small, focused systems is the best way for me to learn, play with, and show where meaningful differences actually exist and where they don't.
The projects on this site: Cloud Sayings, Cloud Challenge, Operation Black Swan, and Assay, are deliberately varied in form but consistent in intent. Each is an experiment in learning, system design, and human–AI interaction. Some explore how models respond to identical prompts, others examine what it's like to build software with AI as a co-developer, and others test how people reason under constraints, uncertainty, and probabilistic events. None are meant to be polished products; they are working artifacts designed to be used, inspected, and learned from.
A core principle across all of them is open engagement. Wherever possible, these projects invite public interaction, through voting, gameplay, shared artifacts, public documents, or open source code. Learning accelerates when systems are exercised by real users and when assumptions are exposed to scrutiny. The guiding philosophy is simple: Serious Learning Through Playful Experimentation. Cirrusly Clever is a home for those experiments, and a record of what they reveal over time.