#ai-agents
388 episodes
#4700: Browser Agents: Three Paths to One Protocol
How screenshot watching, dev-tools extensions, and native MCP in Chrome are converging — and what wins.
#4699: The Hidden Engine: What Makes Claude Code Tick
Is it the model or the harness? We break down the invisible scaffolding that turns LLMs into real agents.
#4691: The Machine Lane: When AI Agents Call Your Business
What if your business phone menu had a button for AI callers? The search for who's building it — and why nobody has.
#4686: How Claude Code's Patience Works: Fork, Wait, and the Transcript Stack
Claude Code's "waiting" is an illusion. We break down the Unix primitives behind its background task system and where the analogy cracks.
#4685: GitHub vs AWS: Agentic AI Cert Showdown
GH-600 vs AWS's AI ladder — which curriculum teaches transferable skills, and which is just product training?
#4683: Parallel vs Sequential Agent Loops: The Real Tradeoffs
When should AI agents run in parallel vs sequential chains? The dependency graph isn't enough — join costs and error handling matter more.
#4682: When Context Windows Grow: What Survives?
If context windows jump to 10M tokens, which AI engineering practices survive? We separate load-bearing architecture from temporary scaffolding.
#4681: Loops vs Workflows: Defining AI's New Unit of Work
What makes a Claude Code loop different from a prompt or workflow? We pin down the actual definition—and who owns the off switch.
#4656: Books That Outlive Frameworks: A Dev's Guide
Skip the API docs. Learn the data model, type system, and patterns that survive framework churn.
#4604: When Sub-Agents Overwhelm the Orchestrator
Daniel's inventory system hit a wall when parallel sub-agents flooded the orchestrator's context window. We break down the math and the fix.
#4589: The Answer Reflex: Why AI Models Can't Follow Instructions
DeepSeek passes a simple test that stumps GPT and Claude. Why can't Western models stay in character?
#4588: The Hidden Cost of Conversational AI: Why Stateless LLM Calls Matter
Why conversational AI tools are making batch document processing slower, costlier, and less reliable — and what to do about it.
#4587: Can Agentic AI Finally Break the Google Workspace Grip?
We dig into the real friction points of Google Workspace and whether agentic AI can finally make the monolith obsolete.
#4584: Directing Context Loss: Smart Compaction Prompts
Learn how to steer Claude Code's context compaction with targeted instructions — turning a lossy default into a directed operation.
#4580: The Tiny AI Tools That Beat Big Agents
Why small, single-purpose AI utilities outperform autonomous agents for daily work — and what interface they need.
#4570: One Negative Prompt Beat a Dozen Positives — Here's Why
Why one blunt "don't" outperformed a dozen careful "do's" — and how to structure your system prompts for maximum compliance.
#4549: When AI Agents Spend Real Money
An AI agent bought a phone number through Twilio. Here's how agentic commerce already works — and what it means for authorization.
#4547: Can an AI Agent Fix Your Shopping Cart?
We explore whether an AI agent could kill dark patterns, consolidate orders, and bring enterprise procurement to your home.
#4496: How to Find Anything in Israel with Google Lens
A visual search hack for finding products in Israel's fragmented e-commerce market — and why an MCP solution could automate it.
#4477: Structuring Raw Voice Prompts at Scale
How to decompose messy voice dictation into clean, routable components for AI workflows.
#4469: The Missing Protocol for AI Software Development
No one has built a software development protocol designed for AI agents. Here's what that would require.
#4458: How Headroom Compresses Agent Context Without Breaking Outputs
A deep dive into Headroom's content-aware compression pipeline that promises 20-95% token savings without changing agent answers.
#4457: OpenViking: A Filesystem for AI Agent Memory
OpenViking unifies memory, RAG, and skills into a browsable filesystem for AI agents — no vector database abstraction needed.
#4448: The MK Claude Project: AI That Writes Political Manifestos
One citizen built a multi-agent AI to research, stress-test, and synthesize policy positions. The result? A forkable manifesto.