The Engineering Notebook — page 13 of 32

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.

GLM-5.2 vs Claude Fable 5: Open-Source AI Challenges the Throne [2026] AI and Machine Learning

GLM-5.2 vs Claude Fable 5: Open-Source AI Challenges the Throne [2026]

Zhipu AI's 753B open-weight GLM-5.2 is the highest-ranking open-source model on lmarena.ai, challenging Claude Fable 5 across WebDev and Agent benchmarks — and it's already runnable locally via Ollama.

Vibe Coding Best Practices in 2026: 7 Techniques That Work (and 3 That Create Tech Debt) Developer Tools

Vibe Coding Best Practices in 2026: 7 Techniques That Work (and 3 That Create Tech Debt)

Vibe coding's creator says it's already passé. Here are the techniques that actually survive the shift to agentic engineering — and the ones silently destroying your codebase.

Context Engineering for AI Agents: 4 Pillars That Replace Prompt Engineering [2026] AI and Machine Learning

Context Engineering for AI Agents: 4 Pillars That Replace Prompt Engineering [2026]

Context engineering — the systematic management of what an AI agent knows, remembers, and can access at each step — is the discipline replacing ad-hoc prompt engineering in 2026. Here are the four pillars that make or break production agents.

NotebookLM Agentic AI Upgrade: What It Does [2026] AI and Machine Learning

NotebookLM Agentic AI Upgrade: What It Does [2026]

Google's NotebookLM evolved from a document Q&A tool into a multi-modal agentic platform — here's what the coding agent actually does and whether it can replace dedicated tools like Claude Code.

7 Open-Source AI Projects Developers Need [June 2026] Developer Tools

7 Open-Source AI Projects Developers Need [June 2026]

The 7 open-source AI projects accumulating GitHub stars faster than anything in history — with honest developer verdicts no YouTube video has time for.

Generative AI vs Agentic AI vs AI Agents [2026 Compared] AI and Machine Learning

Generative AI vs Agentic AI vs AI Agents [2026 Compared]

Everyone's told to 'go agentic' in 2026, but nobody agrees on what that means. Here's the concrete architectural breakdown — with a production decision framework.

Abstract pattern of small lights on dark background AI and Machine Learning

Google Antigravity 2.0: Agent-First Platform [2026 Guide]

Google Antigravity is the new orchestration layer for multi-agent workflows on Google Cloud. Here's what it actually does, how it differs from ADK, and where developers should start.

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Google ADK Tutorial: Build Your First AI Agent [2026]

Google's ADK Python 2.0 is GA with 20K+ GitHub stars — here's how to build, harden, and deploy your first AI agent beyond the happy path.

a rack of electronic equipment in a dark room Developer Tools

Homelab AI Coding Server: Run OpenCode Across All Devices [2026]

How to set up OpenCode as a persistent, PR-gated AI coding server on your homelab — accessible from every device, isolated from production, and free from vendor lock-in.

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Kimi K2.7 Code: Free Claude Code Alternative [2026 Tested]

Moonshot AI's Kimi K2.7 Code drops into Claude Code with three environment variables. I tested it on real coding benchmarks — here's how it stacks up against Claude Sonnet 4 and Opus 4.

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GLM 5.2: China's Open Frontier Model Dropped the Day Anthropic Got Banned [2026]

On June 13, 2026, the US government cracked down on Anthropic's Claude Fable 5. Hours later, China's ZhipuAI open-sourced GLM 5.2 under MIT license — with a 1M context window and frontier-grade coding scores. This is what happened, why it matters, and how to use it today.

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Netflix Headroom: How to Cut AI Agent Costs 10x in Production [2026]

Netflix open-sourced Headroom — a context optimization layer that slashes LLM inference costs by up to 10x. Here's how the architecture works and how any team can apply the same patterns.