Greenspun's Tenth Rule for Integration

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote a previous post about applying these EIPs concretely on Kubernetes for AI orchestration. That post answers “how”; this one is the “why you should care” piece that should have come before it.

Philip Greenspun, writing about Lisp in the mid-1990s, formulated what came to be called his Tenth Rule: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. His point has aged well. Programs grow; the things they need to express grow with them; absent a richer substrate, the missing pieces get reinvented in the language at hand, typically badly.

I Built an AI Video Pipeline. It's Mostly Enterprise Integration Patterns.

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve spent the last few weeks building a documentary video generation pipeline. A topic goes in (say: “Sankebetsu brown bear incident 1915 Hokkaido”) and a finished mp4 comes out (a ten-minute narrated documentary, 27 scenes, original visuals, voiced by a documentary-grade TTS), all running on a homelab cluster.

Between those two endpoints sits a chain of eight passes that hand off to each other. Several fan out to “do N things in parallel and aggregate.” Several produce artifacts measured in MB per scene that should not be shoved through a message broker. A few are the right place to put a human in the loop, where one minute of editorial review saves hours of GPU time downstream.

Eip on Hullabalooing

Greenspun's Tenth Rule for Integration

I Built an AI Video Pipeline. It's Mostly Enterprise Integration Patterns.