Sam Copsey

Blog

Practical guides, opinions, and architecture walkthroughs on AI agents, engineering leadership, and sovereign cloud.

Cast Part 7: Sprint Planning, Spec Writing, and a Foundry OAuth Mystery

Adding capacity-aware sprint planning with human approval gates, a 10-section spec writer built on our Phoenix template that refuses to fabricate ROI data, and debugging a Foundry OAuth consent service failure.

Agent BuildingHow-to· 28 min read

Measuring What Matters: A Framework for AI Success Measurement

Why 95% of AI projects fail to show ROI, and a seven dimension framework for measuring what actually matters: quality, adoption, trust, cognitive load, and strategic impact.

Engineering LeadershipOpinion· 4 min read

Cast Part 6: From Document Generator to Combined Agent

Building a YAML-driven document rendering pipeline, discovering why multi-agent workflows break in Foundry, and consolidating everything into a single GPT-4.1 agent with 50+ tools.

Agent BuildingHow-to· 16 min read

Cast Part 5: Expanding the ADO MCP Server. From 15 Tools to 45!

Growing the custom ADO MCP server from 15 read-only tools to 45 across five domains. Work item writes, team capacity, repository management, wiki pages, error handling abstraction, and JWT validation.

Agent BuildingHow-to· 13 min read

Cast Part 4: ADO Discovery Agent, MCP Servers, WIQL Queries, and Database Sync

Building the first sub-agent in Cast: hosting ADO MCP servers on Container Apps, implementing WIQL hierarchy queries, syncing discovered data to PostgreSQL, and wiring up orchestrator-to-agent routing.

Agent BuildingHow-to· 23 min read

Cast Part 3: First Agent with Microsoft Agent Framework

Installing Microsoft Agent Framework, choosing the right client type for Foundry Agent Service, getting a server-managed orchestrator agent running, and setting up PostgreSQL with pgvector via async Alembic migrations.

Agent BuildingHow-to· 10 min read

Cast Part 2: Provisioning the Azure Infrastructure

Setting up the Terraform state backend, provisioning the core Azure resources for Cast, getting PostgreSQL accessible from a local machine, and configuring Azure AI Foundry with model deployments.

Agent BuildingHow-to· 7 min read

Cast Part 1: Vision, Architecture and Why I'm Building It

Introducing Cast — a multi-agent engineering management system built on Microsoft Foundry. What it does, why I'm building it, and the architecture decisions that shaped it.

Agent BuildingProject writeup· 8 min read

Building This Blog with Astro and Claude Code

How I built blog.samcopsey.co.uk — starting from the official Astro blog tutorial, extending it with React islands, Tailwind CSS v4, and co-developing the whole thing with Claude Code.

DevelopmentProject writeup· 7 min read

Why I'm Starting This Blog

An introduction to what this blog will cover and why I have decided to give it a go!

Engineering LeadershipOpinion· 3 min read