Field notes from the studio
Practical write-ups on shipping AI agents, RAG systems, and data infrastructure into production. No fluff, just what worked.
Do You Actually Need an Agent, or Just a Workflow With an LLM in It?
Before you scope an agent project, answer one question first: does this task need model-driven judgment, or a fixed sequence of steps? Here's a buyer-usable checklist for making that call.
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18 posts
LangGrinch: When Your Agent Framework's Serialization Layer Becomes the Attack Surface
What LangGrinch and a later LangChain advisory mean for dependency ownership, trust boundaries and acceptance checks in an AI agent implementation.
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Your Agent Traces Are Lying to You: The Race to Standardize Agent Observability
OpenTelemetry just shipped semantic conventions for agent spans, Datadog adopted them natively, and the Linux Foundation stood up a new governance body for agent infrastructure. Here's what's actually usable today, what to skip, and why your traces still might not tell you why the agent did what it did.
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AI Agent Implementation Costs: Budgeting Beyond the Token Bill
How to scope AI agent implementation and operating costs, measure cost per accepted task, and test budget controls before a production rollout.
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AI Agent Evaluation: Acceptance Tests Beyond a Judge Score
How to review an agent evaluation plan: connect judge findings to release decisions, test resulting state, and define approvals, failure cases and human review.
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Why Multi-Agent Systems Fail: The First Real Taxonomy of Production Breakdowns
A UC Berkeley study of 1,600+ multi-agent execution traces finally gives the industry a rigorous vocabulary for why agent fleets break in production, and it maps directly onto fixes teams can ship this quarter.
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The Sandbox Is the Product: Why Agent Execution Isolation Just Became Its Own Layer
Agents now write and run their own code. That means the box they run it in matters more than the prompt that got them there. Here's what changed, what broke, and how the isolation decision tree actually works.
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