The Engineering Notebook — 311 posts

Notes on building with AI, agents & the modern stack.

Deep dives on AI/ML, RAG systems, agent engineering, and senior-engineer architecture decisions — a new post every week.

developer monitor terminal logs tracing — illustration for article on OpenTelemetry Instrumentation for AI Agents [2026]:
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AI and Machine Learning 11 min read

OpenTelemetry Instrumentation for AI Agents [2026]: Ship It

A vendor-neutral tracing schema for AI agents: model LLM calls, retrieval, tool runs, retries, and token cost as spans. Then dashboard latency, error tax, and cost per successful task.

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Laptop screen displaying code with colorful lighting. Developer Tools

Rust Allocator: jemalloc vs mimalloc vs tcmalloc for P99 [2026]

Allocator switching can cut P99 latency in Rust services. It can also do absolutely nothing. Here’s how to benchmark it like an adult and tune jemalloc without cargo-culting.

black and gray laptop displaying codes Developer Tools

AI Coding Team Workflow Policy Guide [2026]: Stop the PR Flood

AI coding tools can 2x your PR volume before anyone notices quality is collapsing. Here’s a pragmatic policy for labels, ownership, review SLAs, and enforcement that scales.

Smartphone screen displaying chatgpt interface on keyboard Cybersecurity

Agent-Specific Attack Surfaces Security [2026]: What AppSec Misses

Agents don’t just “generate text”. They read files, browse, call tools, and remember things. That breaks classic AppSec threat models. Here’s the agent-native one—and the mitigations you can actually ship.

a man standing in front of a camera in a stadium Technology

How AI Generates World Cup 2026 Highlights

A full technical walkthrough of the automated broadcast pipeline generating World Cup 2026 highlights — capture, computer vision, AWS Media Replay Engine, and the human annotators nobody mentions.

Computer screen displaying code and terminal prompts Developer Tools

AI Code Review in Your CI/CD Pipeline: 2026 Setup

Every vendor shipped a 2026 'best tools' listicle. None shipped the YAML. Here's a complete, copy-pasteable GitHub Actions config that wires AI code review into your pipeline — triggers, secrets, cost caps, and a real merge gate.

markdown documentation laptop screen — illustration for article on AI-Readable Documentation: 8 Templates That Agents Actually Developer Tools

AI-Readable Documentation: 8 Templates That Agents Actually Use [2026]

Docs aren’t dead. They’re becoming routing logic and evidence. Here’s how to write documentation that AI tools can use without shipping “slop describing slop.”

Laptop displays "the ai code editor" website. Developer Tools

Run Local LLMs in VS Code: No Copilot Plan [2026]

VS Code now wires Ollama and LM Studio straight into Copilot Chat's model picker — no CLI, no Continue.dev, no Copilot subscription. Here's the full 2026 setup, both paths compared, plus the troubleshooting nobody documents.

Person working on a laptop with a spreadsheet outdoors. AI and Machine Learning

Agent Per-Task Cost Calculation [2026]: Retries, Tools, Caching

A spreadsheet-ready expected-cost model for agent workflows that includes retries, tool-call fanout, context growth, and caching. Plus hard budgets you can actually enforce.

Team collaborating around a computer in an office. Developer Tools

5 AI Coding Team Breakdowns Nobody Warns You About [2026]

Your team shipped Claude Code licenses. Now PRs are exploding, prompts are drifting, and reviewers are drowning. Here are the 5 workflow breakdowns and how leading teams are restructuring around them.