AI

173 posts
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AI

Building agents inside an MCP-only architecture

What happens when every tool the agent uses is exposed via MCP, every memory access is via MCP, every observability hook is via MCP. The architecture gets cleaner, the lock-in shrinks, and a few specific design decisions become obvious.

Sid Smith Sid Smith 6 min read
AI in the news: week of October 26, 2025
AI in the News

AI in the news: week of October 26, 2025

OpenAI ships Atlas, an AI-native browser that watches everything you read. Anthropic locks in a million Google TPUs. 850 luminaries call for a superintelligence ban. The week the centralization story got load-bearing at both ends of the stack.

Sid Smith Sid Smith 9 min read
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AI

Why distillation is the most underrated AI pattern of 2025

The headline AI pattern of 2025 is agentic-everything. The pattern that's quietly doing more useful work for actual production systems is distillation, taking a big expensive model's behavior and getting most of it from a much smaller cheaper one.

Sid Smith Sid Smith 5 min read
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Automation

Context drift is the new tech debt

Tech debt was the unfunded liability of an engineering team for two decades. Context drift, the slow erosion of what the AI tools think you're doing, is the equivalent for AI-augmented teams. Same shape, different substrate.

Sid Smith Sid Smith 6 min read
AI in the news: week of October 19, 2025
AI in the News

AI in the news: week of October 19, 2025

Anthropic ships Haiku 4.5, then drops Skills 24 hours later, two releases pulling on the distributed-AI argument. OpenAI-Broadcom go 10 GW custom silicon. NotebookLM gets real chat. The AI-layoff drumbeat keeps building. My take.

Sid Smith Sid Smith 9 min read
AI in the news: week of October 12, 2025
AI in the News

AI in the news: week of October 12, 2025

DevDay week. OpenAI ships GPT-5 Pro in the API, Sora 2 in the API, AgentKit, the Apps SDK, ChatKit, Codex GA, and signs a six-gigawatt AMD compute deal, all on Monday. Then the Sora app starts producing the deepfakes everyone predicted. My read on a heavy week.

Sid Smith Sid Smith 8 min read
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AI

Local LLMs and SOC 2 evidence: talking to auditors

Auditors are starting to ask about AI use in SOC 2 cycles. The shops running local LLMs have a different story to tell than the shops running cloud, and the auditors mostly haven't internalized the difference. Worth being explicit about what evidence actually answers the questions.

Sid Smith Sid Smith 6 min read
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AI

Atomic-unit architecture for AI workloads (how I think about it)

The atomic unit of an AI workload isn't the model call, isn't the request, isn't the user. It's the conversation. The architecture decisions that follow from that, caching, billing, governance, ops, all get cleaner when you start there.

Sid Smith Sid Smith 5 min read
AI in the news: week of October 5, 2025
AI in the News

AI in the news: week of October 5, 2025

California signs SB 53, the first US frontier-AI law. Anthropic ships Sonnet 4.5 with an Agent SDK. OpenAI ships Sora 2 with a biometric-scan social app. The AI-layoff narrative consolidates. My take on a heavy news week.

Sid Smith Sid Smith 7 min read
Vector databases on Kubernetes: Qdrant, Weaviate, Milvus
AI

Vector databases on Kubernetes: Qdrant, Weaviate, Milvus

Qdrant vs Weaviate vs Milvus on K8s. The foundation question for retrieval. StatefulSets, persistent volumes, replication, the operational reality. RAG indexing patterns at homelab scale on engine-01, and the decisions that change shape at fleet scale.

Sid Smith Sid Smith 6 min read
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AI

MetaMCP and the rise of MCP routing layers

MCP solved the agent-to-tool plumbing. The next layer up, routing across many MCP servers, scoping access per agent, observing what's happening, is where MetaMCP and a small cluster of similar tools have started showing up. Worth being plain about why the layer exists.

Sid Smith Sid Smith 6 min read