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Deep-dive guides on AI agents, agent orchestration, MCP, and developer tooling.

7 posts found

Agent Observability

Tracing an Agent Loop: What OpenTelemetry's GenAI Conventions Actually Standardize

Agent traces have a runtime-decided shape, token-based cost, and cross-process tool hops that conventional APM was never built for — here is what OpenTelemetry's gen_ai.* conventions actually pin down, and where tracing an agent loop still breaks in production.

August 8, 2026 · 10 min read
MCP

MCP Authorization: How OAuth 2.1 Actually Secures a Remote MCP Server

MCP started as a trusted local subprocess with no auth story at all. Its authorization spec bolts on OAuth 2.1, PKCE, and resource indicators — here is what each piece actually prevents, including the token-passthrough bug that keeps showing up in early implementations.

August 5, 2026 · 9 min read
AI Coding Assistants

How AI Coding Assistants Actually Work: Context, Diffs, and Permission Boundaries

AI coding assistants aren't one architecture — they're three separable design decisions (how context gets assembled, how edits get applied, how execution gets contained) that every tool from Claude Code to Cursor answers differently.

July 11, 2026 · 10 min read
Prompt Engineering

Prompt Engineering for Agents Is a Different Discipline Than Prompt Engineering for Chat

In agent systems, instructions live across four surfaces — system prompt, tool schemas, tool results, and few-shot text — not one. Most prompt debugging still only looks at the first.

July 7, 2026 · 8 min read
Agent Orchestration

Pipeline, Supervisor, or Mesh: Where Each Multi-Agent Orchestration Pattern Actually Breaks

The three dominant multi-agent orchestration topologies each fail in a different, predictable way once you move past the demo — here is how to pick one based on where your task actually breaks, not which pattern sounds more sophisticated.

July 4, 2026 · 9 min read
Agent Security

The Trust Boundary Problem: Why Tool-Calling Agents Need to Treat Tool Output as Untrusted Input

Most agent security advice targets prompt injection at the wrong layer. The real fix is architectural: separate untrusted tool output from privileged context, scope tool capabilities narrowly, and gate side-effecting actions behind confirmation.

July 2, 2026 · 9 min read
MCP

What Actually Happens Inside an MCP Tool Call

A wire-level look at the Model Context Protocol — capability negotiation, tool discovery, transport tradeoffs, and the context-budget mistakes that quietly degrade agent reliability.

June 29, 2026 · 9 min read