Mechanism-first explainers for important AI projects, protocols, research, and architecture debates.
Tutorials
Explore the mechanisms, tradeoffs, and implementation patterns within this AI engineering track.
“Everything is a plugin” is a claim about architecture, not a feature list. It says the agent loop itself is replaceable — and that is expensive to mean.
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The demo worked. Then the corpus grew, the questions started requiring synthesis across documents, and the same pipeline that felt magical last month now…
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The agent worked yesterday. Today it burns forty thousand tokens before it reads your first instruction, and the hook that used to register identity with a…
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Two projects both advertise "open source, model-agnostic, multi-channel, MCP support." A builder picks one, ships it, and discovers the real difference the…
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"Self-improving agent" is three different mechanisms wearing one coat. Pull the coat off and you find a memory that accumulates, a skill file that gets…
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Two seed-stage teams ship an LLM-backed product. Same headcount, same model access, same demo polish. Eighteen months later, one compounds while the other…
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Ask a system to synthesize five documents into one answer. It does the work. Ask the same question tomorrow, and it does the work again, from scratch, with…
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A coding agent is handed a fixed training script and a fixed success metric: make it run faster without breaking correctness. It rewrites, runs, times, and…
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Your agent has thirty tools, four MCP servers, and a plan-mode toggle. It still fumbles a routine refactor, and when it does, you cannot tell whether the…
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The loop that improves the harness can also edit the evaluator, the permissions, and the rollback path. That is the whole problem in one sentence.
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A team scaffolds an AGENTS.md with /init, the agent improves for a week, and then the file quietly becomes a 14k-token policy document that nobody reads…
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MCP answers "what can I call?" A2A answers "who can I hand this to?" Different questions, different failure modes.
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An agent that only works until the container restarts is not an agent. It is a demo with a heartbeat.
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A scanner that flags ten thousand findings and a researcher who proves three are both "finding vulnerabilities." Only one of them has evidence you can…
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The redesign did not delete state. It relocated it — and everything downstream follows from where it landed.
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Hop three. The context window is full. Half of it is plausible garbage — passages that matched the query, ranked well, and turned out to be useless. The…
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