The .NET AI guy that ships

I’m Gal Ratner. For nearly thirty years I’ve built and shipped production software on the Microsoft and .NET stack — for Microsoft, Sony, Rockstar Games, 2K, Best Buy, and Allegiant Air, among others. I was employee #6 at Break.com. Today I design agentic AI systems that run in production: MCP servers, the Microsoft Agent Framework, RAG pipelines, SQL Server 2025 vector search, and the observability that keeps all of it honest.

This is where I write about the distance between what the AI industry sells and what it actually delivers.

It isn’t hype and it isn’t doom. I’m genuinely bullish on AI that works — and ruthless about AI that doesn’t. I do the research first, name the companies and the executives, and bring the receipts. When a claim doesn’t survive contact with a real codebase, I say so, with sources.

What you’ll get

Deep, adversarial breakdowns of AI economics and the bubble question, labor displacement and the data-center land grab, executive conduct, and the enshittification of tools we used to trust. Alongside that, the engineering: how to actually build agentic systems that hold together over a long horizon, why I bet on .NET over Python for production agents, and where today’s architectures quietly fall apart. Practitioner-first, data-grounded, and written by someone who has to make this stuff work on Monday morning.

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Off the keyboard

When I’m not shipping code or picking a fight with a press release, I train Brazilian jiu-jitsu in Las Vegas, ride motorcycles, and co-host Edge Grip Podcast. I also wrote a novel, The Archive of Lost Suns.

My personal website is: galratner.com

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