AI Tooling & Notes
The agents and tooling the daily work actually runs on: Claude Code and its skills, MCP servers, sub-agent teams, memory files, local models, token cost. Every note asks the same question — what transfers to someone else's setup, and what is a quirk of mine.
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Native versus normalized tokens: why your cost formula diverges from the OpenRouter bill
Three systems reported three sums for one window. Only one of them was an independent measurement, and the tokens in the response were not the tokens on the bill.
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The agent loop under a durable orchestrator: where the line runs
An agent graph and a durable execution engine are both orchestrators. A month on a bench showed where to draw the line between them, and what it costs.
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A Staff Engineer Made of Sub-Agents: What I Adopt and What I Skip
The Senior Staff Engineer pattern for Claude Code, read by an engineer running his own four-role sub-agent teams: context isolation and the verification gate — yes; the 1% Rule and the Delete Rule — no.
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MCP for DevOps: start with a read-only agent in your cluster
By 2026 there are 10,000+ MCP servers. The first one to give an agent in your cluster is read-only — here is what it buys and how to grant it.
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AI rewrites DevOps: from syntax to judgment
What AI already does better than an engineer, where the human’s value remains, and how the senior DevOps role shifts by 2026.
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A Local LLM for Coding: Not «Which» but «Where»
A review of the practical method for picking a local coding model by hardware — and where local models have a real niche while only the cloud holds the line on precision.
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The 2026 Terminal Stack Through a Linux User's Eyes: What's Portable, What's MacBook Optics
The "ultimate 2026 stack" guide is written for macOS. I review it from a Linux/Wayland chair: Ghostty versus Konsole, a strong backend, and the gaps you must fill.
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Agentic AI Security: Porting Enterprise Patterns Down to a Solo Harness
Biswas's architecture handles the identity layer well via OAuth and token exchange — but the real danger lives on the intent layer, which the article never reaches.
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Saving Tokens in Agents: What the Survey Gets Right and What It Over-sells
A map of four token-cost techniques — caching, lazy tools, routing, compaction. It buries the cache's real consequence in a footnote, while two counter-intuitive facts are worth the whole map.
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The Short Memory File Collapses at Scale: Tokens Versus Rule Precedence
Keeping the memory file tiny is right for a solo repository. But compliance rules from several organizations cannot be pinned to paths — they must be routed.
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An Obsidian Second Brain Is a Layer, Not the Agent's Whole Memory
Monteiro's zoned wiki is the right mechanism, but agent memory is a taxonomy of layers; and any layer that ingests the outside world must be scanned for injection before synthesis.
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CLAUDE.md: Contract or Layers? Where the Viral File Is Right and Where It Stops
The viral CLAUDE.md is right for the median: start flat. But compliance cannot be asked for — it must be mechanized. On what to write in the file and what to lift into the harness.
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The Harness Is the Cheap Part: Notes on Rebuilding Claude Code
A commentary on Fareed Khan's from-scratch rebuild of Claude Code — and why its central conclusion should be flipped.
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Claude Code Is a Skill: Notes on Leo Godin's Argument
Agreeing with the "LLMs are a skill" thesis and adding the experience the original left out.
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Should you still learn to code in 2026 — notes on Marina Wyss
A walk-through of her Medium piece: where she is right, where she over-simplifies, and what I would add.