Architecture
29 posts — newest first.
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Agent Sandboxes Start 6× Faster Now. Isolation Just Got Cheaper Than the Workaround.
Cloudflare cut median time-to-interactive from 4.0s to 648ms. The number matters because cold start is why teams share sandboxes they shouldn't share.
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Sagas and Two-Phase Commit: What You Do When There Is No Rollback
Three services, one transaction, and no shared database. Why 2PC blocks, how sagas trade atomicity for compensation, and why compensation is not undo.
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Sharding and Partitioning: Splitting Data Without Splitting Your Sanity
One database eventually runs out of one machine. Sharding buys headroom — but the shard key you pick is a near-permanent decision. Here's how to choose it.
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Agent browsing got 3–7× cheaper and 1.8× slower. Both numbers change your design.
Cloudflare's Kitesurf is a browser built for agents, not people. The measured trade-off, what it can't do, and why cheap browsing rewrites your threat model.
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A reasoning model just became a platform default. The lock-in isn't where you're looking.
Salesforce made Claude the default model across Agentforce and Slack. Where model dependency actually accrues, and the five exits worth keeping open.
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The runner is the API: why your remediator's contract matters more than your handlers
Everyone reviews the handler that restarts the pod. The safety lives in the runner around it — and handlers that skip it silently void every guarantee.
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One VM, one GPU, 100 customers: what it actually takes to sell access to an open-weight model
An open-weight model serving HTTP takes twenty minutes. Making it something 100 customers can share takes a control plane. The whole path, with numbers.
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Most of your AI platform's traffic doesn't need a frontier model
Small models got good enough in 2026. But the win isn't using them — it's making model choice a platform tier with a router, eval gate, and demotion path.
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MCP 2026-07-28 shipped: the stateless core is the headline, header routing is the story
The final MCP spec deletes sessions, mirrors requests into HTTP headers, and turns elicitation into multi-round-trip calls. What breaks, and what to audit.
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MCP is the hands, A2A is the handshake: the two-layer agent protocol stack
A2A hit v1.0 with 150+ orgs behind it. MCP connects agents to tools; A2A connects agents to each other. What the two-layer stack means for platform teams.
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The reliability gap: a framework for trusting autonomous SRE agents
An autonomous airline agent rebooked 1,247 passengers wrong in one weather event. Trusting agents is a reliability problem — here's how to measure it.
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The Five Types of Agentic Memory (and When to Use Each)
Agentic memory is five things — working, episodic, semantic, procedural, entity — each with its own storage, eviction, and failure mode. A decision guide.
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Agentic AI Patterns: The Decision Guide (Part 1 of 3)
Six agentic AI patterns — ReAct, Plan-and-Execute, Critic, fan-out, HITL gate, Supervisor — with a decision flowchart for picking one before you build.
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The trust gap: bounded autonomy for AI SRE agents
SREs face 50+ alerts a day at 60% false positives while vendors promise autonomous resolution. The autonomy ladder: what an AI agent should never do alone.
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Context engineering: the window is a budget, not a bucket
The context window is your agent's working memory, not a junk drawer. Four operations — write, select, compress, isolate — and a token budget you allocate.
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What are vector embeddings?
A primer on vector embeddings — how meaning becomes something you can search, cluster, and compare, and the failure modes you only see in evaluation.
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What is function calling (tool use)?
A primer on function calling — the JSON-schema contract that lets an LLM invoke your code. The request/response loop, parallel calls, and forced tools.
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What is prompt caching?
Prompt caching cuts repeated-prompt cost 50–90% and halves latency. How prefix matching works, TTL economics by provider, and what decides your hit rate.
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The CAP theorem in AI-native distributed systems
CAP didn't get repealed when LLMs showed up. How the C/A/P trade-offs shift when the datastore is a vector index, context graph, or retrieval layer.
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What is Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)?
A primer on Retrieval-Augmented Generation — grounding an LLM's answer in documents you trust. Indexing, serving, and the failure modes that bite.
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Mental models for applying AI to infrastructure
Tutorials answer how; mental models answer whether. Seven I use as the front gate before any LLM goes near a production system.
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Queues and Message Brokers: The Shock Absorber of Distributed Systems
A queue decouples producers from consumers and absorbs bursts. Backpressure, at-least-once delivery, idempotency, DLQs — now in front of every LLM call.
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Graph Traversal: BFS, DFS, and Why GraphRAG Is Just a Walk
BFS or DFS — queue or stack — decides everything downstream. A refresher on graph traversal, the visited set, and why GraphRAG is just a walk.
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Floating Point and Numerical Precision: Why 0.1 + 0.2 ≠ 0.3, and Why ML Cares
Floating-point errors aren't random. Why 0.1 + 0.2 ≠ 0.3, and how the same fundamentals drive the FP32 → BF16 → FP8 march behind affordable LLMs.
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The Memory Hierarchy: Why Data Locality Beats Clock Speed
Each memory level is 10–100× slower than the one above. Cache lines, locality, and why 'keep data near compute' is the biggest lever in LLM inference.
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Concurrency vs Parallelism: The Distinction That Fixes Your Throughput
Concurrency is dealing with many things at once; parallelism is doing them at once. A refresher on the GIL, async vs threads, and scaling model calls.
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Caching and Eviction Policies: Why LRU, LFU, and FIFO Aren't the Same Bet
The eviction policy decides whether your cache works. LRU vs LFU vs FIFO, hit rates, invalidation — and how the same bets govern prompt and KV caches.
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Hash Tables: The Data Structure Behind Almost Everything
The hash table sits under your cache, index, dedup, and vector store metadata. How it turns a key into O(1) access — and what keeps it fast.
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Big-O Notation in the Age of Billion-Vector Search
Big-O still decides whether your system survives real data. A refresher on complexity, and why it governs vector search, context windows, and outages.