IDEAS, DECISIONS & LESSONS
Notes on AI, architecture and building useful products.
166 articles
30 Aug 2026 · 4 min read
ai-tools
GitHub's August 28 Visual Studio update adds Low/Medium/High thinking-effort controls per model, plus a model management view with context window and cost info. A Tech Lead's take on why per-call effort tuning matters more than picking 'the best model' — and how it compares to the reasoning-effort trap we already learned the hard way with open models.
Read more30 Aug 2026 · 4 min read
ai-agents
Anthropic's Aug 27 research preview of MHS gives AI agents a standard interface to operate lab and manufacturing hardware. As a Tech Lead who has wired MCP servers to internal tools, here's why this is MCP's shape applied to physical devices — and what breaks when the tool call controls a centrifuge instead of a database.
Read more28 Aug 2026 · 4 min read
agentic coding
Meta shipped Muse Code on Aug 5-6, 2026 — a terminal coding agent with persistent background agents and a $0.10/1M contributor tier. It loses on every benchmark it publishes. Here's why a tech lead should still care.
Read more28 Aug 2026 · 4 min read
ai
OpenAI and Broadcom taped out Jalapeño, a custom inference ASIC, in 16 months — and independent SemiAnalysis benchmarks show it beating Nvidia Blackwell on perf-per-watt. A tech lead's read on what vertical integration in AI infra means for your cost curve.
Read more27 Aug 2026 · 4 min read
agent architecture
Grok isn't a model, it's an agent system: tools trained into the reasoning, real-time X and web search on xAI's infra, a four-agent cross-verifying architecture, long-running agents. I break down its features, architecture, and safety harness — then map each piece to a component I can build self-hosted on a subscription I already pay for.
Read more26 Aug 2026 · 4 min read
agentic engineering
A one-line prompt tweak can silently break an agent, and you won't notice until a user does. My fix is an eval harness: a golden set of inputs and checks, run against every agent and workflow on every change. Here's the anatomy — deterministic checks, LLM-as-judge, run-on-change regression, and grading multi-agent workflows.
Read more26 Aug 2026 · 4 min read
agent tools
A 'bot' in an agent platform isn't a monolith. It's a small tool plus a persona that knows when to call it. Using my Grok image generator as the worked example: the tool-vs-MCP decision, the function schema that doubles as a prompt, the tool loop, and turning a tool into a bot.
Read more25 Aug 2026 · 5 min read
ai
Anthropic logged its 166th outage of 2026 this week, the sixth in August alone. If your product has an LLM call on the critical path, here's the resilience architecture that actually survives that.
Read more25 Aug 2026 · 4 min read
agent architecture
I already run a self-hosted autonomous engineer. When I wanted Cursor's cloud agents too, I didn't pick one — I made the executor swappable. Here's the integration architecture that turns any hosted coding agent into a first-class engine behind my own surface, in four small pieces.
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