From Motion Planning to Agent Tooling: Why I’m Writing on DEV

Hi DEV community!
I’m Ari - a roboticist and senior software engineer based in San Francisco. My background has spent a lot of time living at the intersection of complex physical systems and developer infrastructure: autonomous navigation, motion planning, ROS, and building reliable platforms for physical robots.

Recently, a lot of my engineering cycles have shifted toward another fast-evolving frontier: agentic workflows, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, and developer tooling.

Robotics and agentic AI have surprisingly deep parallels. Both deal with non-deterministic environments, real-time decision-making, latency budgets, tool execution, and the eternal challenge of state management. Building robust agent infrastructure feels a lot like writing controller loops: you need clean interfaces, rapid feedback loops, and bulletproof observability.

What I’m Currently Hacking On

• Custom MCP Servers: Exploring how standardizing agent-tool interfaces can streamline real-world developer workflows.
• Local Model Workflows: Running and benchmarking lightweight LLMs locally using Ollama on Linux hardware.
• Logistics & Schedule Parsers: Turning messy, multi-track real-world convention schedules into structured, queryable data using multi-agent systems.
• Full-Stack Tooling: Building fast, clean frontends and automated pipelines with TypeScript, React, Vite, Docker, and GitHub Actions.

What You Can Expect Here

I’m using this space to document practical technical experiments, architectural breakdowns, and lessons learned from the field:

• Hands-on guides to building, testing, and deploying custom MCP servers.
• System architecture notes comparing robotics control loops to LLM agent orchestration.
• Practical CI/CD and automation patterns for indie technical projects.
• Occasional musings on human movement mechanics and improvisational systems (I'm an avid West Coast Swing dancer and improv comedy nerd off-duty).

You can check out my broader robotics research, past publications, and engineering background on my portfolio at arii.github.io, and follow my lifestyle and community software experiments at boomtick.blog.

Say Hello!

I'd love to connect with folks building in the robotics space, experimenting with MCP, or optimizing local-first agent setups.

What are you hacking on this week? Drop a comment below or say hi!