The Engineering Notebook — page 7 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.
Developer Tools AI Coding Assistant Reviews 2026: The Only Buyer Framework That Holds Up
In 2026, the best AI coding assistant isn’t the smartest model. It’s the one that hits latency SLOs, finds the right code, and ships with governance that won’t get you fired.
![developer monitor terminal logs tracing — illustration for article on OpenTelemetry Instrumentation for AI Agents [2026]:](https://img.kunalganglani.com/images/vzekdneq/production/f126a9eb93656ea60adeae440cf4b74ed0b5fb93-1200x675.webp?auto=format&fit=max&q=75&w=600)
AI and Machine Learning 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
AI and Machine Learning Gemma 4 26B CPU Inference Benchmark: 5 tok/s Production Math [2026]
A $300 Xeon from 2013 runs Gemma 4 26B at 5 tok/s with no GPU. Here's the memory bandwidth math, quantization tradeoffs, and production decision framework nobody else is covering.