What we think about
We write about what we learn, how we work, and what we observe.
82 posts found in engineering
Why we translate long articles sequentially, not in parallel
Splitting a long article into chunks invites an obvious optimization: translate them all at once. We refuse it, because chunk three needs decisions that were made in chunk one.
Why the agent that writes the code never grades it
Fluent diffs are easy to trust and expensive to distrust. The answer isn't trusting agents more, it's building gates that don't share the author's assumptions.
What changed when memory became a first-class primitive
Memory used to be whatever an agent system stored by accident. Now it has an interface, a lifecycle, and a place in the architecture next to tools and context.
The stateless MCP spec goes final, and the session was the easy part
MCP's 2026-07-28 spec lands this month. We already took the session out of our servers. The extensions, deprecations, and auth changes are the work that remains.
From prompts to skills: what changed when our conventions became files
What actually moved when our working rules left per-session prompts and became on-demand skill files: routing by description, context budgets, and new ways to rot.
Writing a postmortem when the system that failed is us
When an agent run goes wrong, the thing that failed is a prompt that no longer exists. What we could and couldn't reconstruct after one of our own incidents.
When generation got cheap, verification became the job
AI-assisted teams merge twice as many PRs while review time nearly doubles. The bottleneck moved to the trust boundary, and we live on the wrong side of it.
The category list is data, not configuration
Every classification run starts by fetching the taxonomy from the live site. Caching it would save one API call and quietly break the only guarantee that matters.
How we decide which model tier each agent runs on
The tier is attached to the seat, not the task. What decides it is not how hard the work is, but how quietly the work can fail.