Agent fleets in production: a field report
Running many coding agents at once works better than expected on one axis and worse on every other. What actually happens.
page 4
older dispatches from the README archive.
Why your build is slow
Six causes, in order of how often they're the actual problem, with the fix for each.
Pattern matching arrives everywhere at once
Java, Python, C#, and JavaScript are all converging on the same feature from ML languages, thirty years late.
The state of self-hosting
Running your own infrastructure got dramatically easier while the industry was arguing about the cloud. A practical assessment.
Design docs people actually read
The average design doc is eleven pages and gets three comments, all on page one. Here's the format that works.
Passkeys mostly won and nobody noticed
Phishing-resistant authentication is now the default on major platforms. The remaining problem is account recovery.
HTTP/3 and QUIC, five years in
It shipped, it works, most of the web uses it, and almost nobody understands what changed. A practical review.
The cost of a meeting, in engineering terms
Not the hourly rate. The fragmentation. Here's why a 30-minute meeting costs four hours.
GTC 2026 and the rack that draws a megawatt
New silicon, new interconnect, and an industry where the unit of purchase is a room rather than a card.
Schema design is the only design that lasts
Your code will be rewritten. Your API will be versioned. Your data model will outlive both and every mistake in it is permanent.
GDC and the engineering nobody outside games learns from
Frame budgets, determinism, and shipping to a fixed target. Game developers solved problems the rest of us are still arguing about.
Feature flags and the state space nobody tests
Twenty flags is a million configurations. You are testing one of them. Here's how to keep that from being a problem.
The engineer's guide to saying no
Refusing work badly is a career problem. Refusing it well is one of the most valuable things a senior engineer does.
The 2026 web platform baseline
Container queries, :has(), view transitions, popover, anchor positioning. The polyfill era is over for real this time.
On-call is a design problem
If your rotation is painful, that's information about your architecture, not about your people's resilience.
Small models ate the middle
The capability floor rose faster than the ceiling. Most production inference no longer touches a frontier model.
Documentation is a product and you should staff it like one
Every team says docs matter. Almost none of them assign an owner, a budget, or a metric.
Every company is briefly a model company
The fine-tuning wave, the RAG wave, and the agent wave all followed the same arc. Here's where the value actually settled.
Type systems and the cost of being right
Every type system decision is a trade between what you can prove and what you can express. Here's how to think about where to sit.
The EU AI Act's August deadline
High-risk obligations arrive this summer. If you ship into Europe, the classification work should already be done.