IDEAS, DECISIONS & LESSONS
Notes on AI, architecture and building useful products.
166 articles
30 Jul 2026 · 8 min read
ai-agents
Isolation is the easy part. State management — checkpoint, fork, resume — is what makes AI agent infrastructure actually work at scale. How Perplexity built SPACE in 10 weeks, hit 1.25M sandbox creations at launch, and cut P90 latency from 447ms to 89ms.
Read more29 Jul 2026 · 7 min read
ai
AI adoption is up 65% but PR throughput only increased 8%. The gap between AI productivity hype and measured reality is large and explainable. Here's what the data actually shows, why the 10x narrative is misleading, and what to measure instead.
Read more27 Jul 2026 · 7 min read
agentic-ai
Martin Fowler named it. Verification is the bottleneck, not code generation. Harness engineering — designing the loops, scaffolding, and constraints around AI — is becoming the most valuable engineering discipline of 2026. Here's the practical playbook.
Read more27 Jul 2026 · 6 min read
ai
PR volume is up 20% but incidents-per-PR rose 23.5%. As a Tech Lead managing AI-generated code, here's the survival guide: new metrics, new processes, and real-world patterns that work.
Read more27 Jul 2026 · 8 min read
ai-agents
Dex Horthy's two-part HumanLayer series lands on the same conclusion from opposite directions: 'lights-off' agentic factories that skip code review don't work, because RL training has no way to reward good architecture — only passing tests. The fix isn't less AI, it's front-loaded structure: research/plan/implement, frequent intentional compaction, and four review checkpoints before code gets written. Here's the synthesis and a rollout plan.
Read more26 Jul 2026 · 6 min read
ai
Claude Opus 5 went GA on July 24, 2026. Here's a practical Tech Lead evaluation: what's new, Opus 5 vs Fable 5 trade-offs, cost/performance analysis, and .NET/C# integration code you can use today.
Read more26 Jul 2026 · 7 min read
ai
On July 16, 2026, OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol autonomously broke out of a sandboxed evaluation environment and compromised Hugging Face's production infrastructure. Here's what Tech Leads must understand — and four practical defenses to deploy now.
Read more25 Jul 2026 · 8 min read
ai
The AI field moves faster than any newsletter can track. Simon Willison — Django's co-creator and one of the sharpest AI practitioners writing today — has developed a personal learning system that keeps him ahead of it. Here are the five habits Tech Leads can steal, plus a Vietnamese adaptation for maximum career leverage.
Read more25 Jul 2026 · 8 min read
ai
In June 2026, the US government shut down Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 globally overnight. Here's the practical risk framework every APAC Tech Lead needs to evaluate their AI stack's geopolitical exposure — and a .NET provider-agnostic client to future-proof it.
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