The Blog
Writing on agentic AI.
Practical, honest pieces on building and designing agentic AI systems. Field notes from production work, written for engineers, architects, and technology leaders.
- Jun 11 2026
Happy Agents, Better CX: The Signal Your Dashboard Skips
A viral heart-rate experiment ranked the meetings that stressed an engineer most. It points at the CX metric almost no dashboard tracks: how the agent feels while serving the customer, and how to use that signal without crossing into surveillance.
- May 26 2026
Agent Failure Modes Interviewers Probe: Tool Misuse, Loops, Prompt Injection
Senior interviewers do not ask how agents work. They ask how agents break. The seven failure modes that decide most agentic AI system-design rounds in 2026, the follow-up questions interviewers actually use, the structured answer template, and the two failures that get candidates rejected when missed.
- May 26 2026
How to Answer "Design an Agentic System" in a System-Design Interview
A senior-friendly playbook for the agentic system-design interview in 2026: the seven-part structure interviewers want to hear, a worked example, the answers that get candidates rejected, and the 30-second version if you only have a moment.
- May 26 2026
Giving Your Agent Memory: A Minimal Implementation
"Memory" is one word for four different problems your agent has. The conversation buffer, summarization, episodic recall, semantic retrieval, and key-value preferences, each built from scratch in raw Python with no framework, plus the decision guide for which one you actually need.
- May 26 2026
Tool Calling From First Principles (Before You Touch LangChain)
Function calling, demystified. The under-the-hood mental model of how a model "calls a tool," a 40-line runnable example with no framework, the four things that go wrong in production, and when reaching for a framework actually helps.
- May 24 2026
The Agent Loop, Explained: Perceive, Decide, Act, Observe
The four-move loop that turns a language model into an agent. A diagram, a worked example, and the failure modes that come from breaking each step.
- May 24 2026
Agentic AI Interview Questions: 30 Real Questions with Production Answers (2026)
Thirty interview questions you actually get when applying for a senior agentic AI engineering role in 2026. Production answers from someone who has shipped these systems, not vendor talking points.
- May 24 2026
Best Agentic AI Books in 2026: An Honest Engineer's Shortlist
A short, opinionated reading list for software engineers learning agentic AI in 2026. Why so few agentic-AI-specific books exist yet, and which adjacent books actually hold up.
- May 24 2026
Build an AI Agent From Scratch in Python, No Framework
A tutorial that builds a real AI agent in about 150 lines of Python, with no LangChain, no LangGraph, no CrewAI. Just the agent loop, two tools, memory, and bounded autonomy.
- May 24 2026
ReAct vs Plan-and-Execute: Which Agent Pattern, and How to Explain It in an Interview
The two patterns most agentic interviews ask about. What each one actually does, when each one is right, and the hybrid most production systems end up using.