Attention Is the New Bottleneck. Engineer It Like One.
Agents made execution cheap and human attention scarce. The answer isn't more discipline — it's building the same kind of infrastructure that solved every other bottleneck before this one.
Posts tagged “ai-agents”
Where Your $20K in Tokens Actually Goes
A $20K monthly token bill isn't one cost — it's a pipeline with four measurable leaks: retries, prompt bloat, MCP schema overhead, and redundant judge passes. Treat the invoice as telemetry, and half of it turns out to be waste.
Build a Self-Improving Agent Harness in an Afternoon
You cannot retrain Claude. You cannot fine-tune GPT. The weights belong to Anthropic and OpenAI, and no amount of clever prompting changes a single parameter. That fact makes a lot of engineers…
Maintainability Is the Last Mile, and It Doesn't Benchmark Away
The newest coding-agent benchmark grades the work that eats a senior engineer's week: messy bugs, investigation, maintainability, taste. Those are the skills a rising pass rate keeps hiding.
OpenTelemetry Tells You What Your Agent Did. Not Whether It Was OK.
OpenTelemetry's GenAI conventions will tell you your agent called Claude, spent 1,843 input tokens, took 900 milliseconds, and returned without an error. They will not tell you the answer cited…
Loading Tool Schemas on Demand Is How Agents Scale
An agent connected to five MCP servers can burn 55,000 tokens on tool schemas before it reads the first word of your request. GitHub's server ships 35 tools at roughly 26K tokens. Slack adds 11…
Brand on the CV Is a 2018 Heuristic
Someone on r/devops just asked whether to take an AWS Cloud Support Engineer role for 18 months — trading hands-on building for "AWS internals exposure and the brand on the CV." Both replies told…
Three Memory Systems Under One Login. Stop Picking Sides.
Anthropic now ships at least three different memory models inside the Claude product family, and they don't behave the same way. Claude.ai has a chat memory feature for Pro, Max, Team, and…
The 'Agent-Only' Role That Wasn't
Microsoft just patched a built-in Entra ID role they shipped as scoped to "agent identities" — and which, in practice, let anyone holding that role take over almost any service principal in the…
AWS Frontier Agents: What $50/Hour Pen Testing and $30/Hour SRE Means for Platform Teams
AWS just launched two autonomous AI agents — Security Agent and DevOps Agent — and they're both generally available now. These aren't chatbots with polished wrappers. They're persistent,…
The 95% Failure Rate Nobody Talks About: Why Your AI Agent Project Is Probably Doomed
Your AI agent project is going to fail. Not because the technology doesn't work—it does. Not because your team isn't smart—they are. It's going to fail because you're building the wrong thing, for…