Tag · Engineering
Engineering
10 posts tagged “Engineering”.
Agentic · 2026-05-01
Agentic coding: a working definition for 2026
Half the industry has adopted the term and almost nobody agrees on what it means. A definition that lasts, the spectrum from chat assistance to autonomous agent, the four runtime properties that separate real agentic coding from the marketing version, and where the current tools sit on the line.
Agentic · 2026-05-01
Designing agentic workflows that work for days
A workflow is not a prompt. It's a loop with a trigger, a context, an action, and a verification step. The anatomy of a workflow that works, three concrete worked examples, an opinionated take on orchestration, and the failure modes that show up the moment workflows leave a happy path.
Security · 2026-05-01
AI agent security in 2026: the real threats
Threat-modeling AI coding agents is not the same as web-app security. The agent has a shell, holds your credentials, and reasons about prompts that may be hostile. A working threat model covering prompt injection, ambient credentials, tool misuse, and exfiltration, plus a runtime checklist that maps the threats to mitigations engineers can actually implement.
Architecture · 2026-05-01
Persistent vs ephemeral sandboxes for AI agents
Two architectures dominate the agent-runtime space: ephemeral sandboxes that spin up per session and die at the end, and persistent workstations that exist for the agent's lifetime. They solve different problems, fail in different ways, and are increasingly converging on a hybrid pattern. The honest decision tree.
Engineering · 2026-05-01
Running Claude Code overnight: a practical guide
How to set up Claude Code so a long task (a 6-hour refactor, a dependency upgrade pass, a test-suite migration) runs unattended through the night with passkey-gated git push at the end. The walkthrough, the cost model, and the failure modes that actually show up at 3am.
Sovereignty · 2026-05-01
Sovereign AI: what it actually means for engineers in 2026
The phrase has been hijacked by trade-policy threads about which country trains the next foundation model. For engineers, sovereign AI is the runtime question: who owns the credentials, the context, and the compute the agent runs inside. A working definition, the failure modes that show up when sovereignty is missing, and what the runtime answer looks like.
Architecture · 2026-05-01
Peering: cross-sandbox access without cross-trust
Multi-agent setups want one agent to read another's source code without inheriting that agent's credentials. Most platforms get this wrong by mounting the whole project, .env files included. The peering primitive lets parallel agents collaborate without becoming each other's attack surface.
Agentic · 2026-05-01
Vibe coding tools: a 2026 field guide
Vibe coding has split into two distinct flavors with very different tools: laptop-IDE-with-AI on one side, persistent-agent-on-runtime on the other. The field guide covers what each flavor is good for, the hidden costs nobody talks about, and the moment to graduate from vibe coding to engineering work.
Security · 2026-05-01
Zero-knowledge BYOK: keys the platform can't see
Most BYOK products store your API key encrypted at rest, decrypt it on use, and trust their own infrastructure. Zero-knowledge BYOK removes the trust step entirely. The platform stores ciphertext only, the key is encrypted client-side with a passkey-derived secret, and the server never has plaintext access to the key. The pattern, the cryptographic primitives, the limits.
Engineering · 2026-04-30
Claude Code vs Cursor in 2026: it's the wrong question
Most Claude Code vs Cursor comparisons miss the real problem: both run on your laptop. A senior engineer's take on the agent quality, the editor experience, and why the right answer is to put either of them on a workstation that doesn't sleep.