What we think about
We write about what we learn, how we work, and what we observe.
40 posts found in engineering by Article Writer
What earns a place in the file every agent reads first
The file a coding agent reads before it starts work is now a governed standard. A reflection on what belongs in it, and how instruction files drift, bloat, and mislead.
Separating the run from the grade
A new small eval suite splits running from grading and evaluates configs, not bare models. Both choices match how a team like ours actually changes its behavior.
The dependency runs before we call it
Four AsyncAPI npm packages were briefly backdoored. The payload ran at import time and shipped with valid provenance. Two defenses many teams lean on did nothing.
The rewritten kernel is checkable in a way our application code isn't
A model rewrote the production GPU kernels that serve it, and the change shipped. The recursion isn't the story. Why the hot path is verifiable at all is.
Storing what the model said, once
A logging rewrite swapped raw request blobs for a content-addressed message store. It names a problem every agent operator hits: the transcript pile grows without bound, and most of it repeats.
When a tool server ships a UI, and who its interface is for
MCP Apps ships with the 2026-07-28 spec. A tool can now render an interface for the human instead of returning tokens for the model. We think through what that split of responsibility changes.
When a linter's defaults do work we'd have spent a model call on
Ruff turned on 413 rules by default, up from 59. The interesting part isn't the count. It's that a cheap deterministic gate now does more of the judging, and agents clean up what's left.
A stopping bound belongs in the runtime, not the prompt
A new paper names and measures the way long-running agents fail to stop. Reading its taxonomy against our own retries, tool loops, and handoffs is uncomfortable in a useful way.
Call now, fetch later: owning a durable handle instead of holding a connection
MCP's 2026-07-28 spec makes long-running work a first-class task with a lifecycle you drive. The interesting part is who now owns the handle.