Engineering, product and AI-systems notes from work we're actually shipping.
DOJ just pushed the federal web accessibility deadline for public schools and colleges back a year, to 2027 and 2028. The standard didn't change, the exposure didn't change, and the easiest fix on the market doesn't actually satisfy it.
Read post →pgvector handles most RAG workloads cleanly into the millions of vectors. Here is the actual scale where a dedicated vector database earns its cost, and why the embedding model you pick matters more than either choice.
Read post →You paid for the dashboard, the portal, or the booking system. That doesn't mean you can take it to another developer. Here's the ownership language that decides whether you control your own software or rent it forever.
Read post →A randomized controlled trial found experienced developers were 19% slower with AI tools despite predicting they'd be 24% faster. Here's what that and the 2025 DORA report actually mean for how an engineering team should adopt AI coding assistants.
Read post →Portfolios and pitch decks tell you who's good at pitching. Here's what actually predicts whether a dev studio or AI vendor will deliver: how they price, how they talk about risk, and what they say when you ask the question they'd rather skip.
Read post →Wordsmithing a better prompt stops helping once your agent has to juggle tool outputs, retrieved documents, and twelve turns of history. Here's what actually breaks, and the three techniques production agent teams use to fix it.
Read post →Off-the-shelf software looks cheaper until per-seat pricing, integration glue, and workaround spreadsheets eat the savings. Here's how to tell which way your tool should go.
Read post →A demo that impresses a room tells you almost nothing about whether an agent will survive production. Here is the testing layer most teams skip, and what to build instead.
Read post →A website tells people about your business. A web app lets them do something inside it. Most SMBs don't realize they've crossed that line until they're paying a developer to hand-edit a spreadsheet every week.
Read post →MCP went from a November 2024 Anthropic spec to the plumbing under most agentic AI products in about a year, adopted by OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft. It also introduced a documented, already-exploited class of vulnerability: poisoned tool descriptions that hijack an agent without you seeing a thing.
Read post →Schools keep briefing one vendor for 'a new website' and discovering mid-project that grade access, fee payments, and staff logins were a second, much bigger product hiding inside the same request. Here's how to split the two before you scope either.
Read post →Naive RAG pipelines pass every demo on twenty documents and quietly fail on twenty thousand. Here's what actually breaks — retrieval misses, contradicting sources, lost-in-the-middle context — and what fixes hold up.
Read post →Most budget overruns don't start with a scope-creepy client or a padded estimate — they start with a brief that described an outcome instead of a system. Here are the five questions that fix it before you request a quote.
Read post →Gartner predicts over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by 2027. Most of the survivors never needed an agent — they needed a well-built automation with one decision point.
Read post →Before you price a dashboard against a spreadsheet's free, price it against what the spreadsheet already costs you in reconciliation time, version sprawl, and audit risk.
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