TL;DR: The AWS Prescriptive Guidance paper on MCP gives the most useful, checkable rules in its tool-design section, so I wrote code to test them. A token-tax counter on a realistic 20-tool GitHub ser…
AgenticAI
24 posts tagged AgenticAI · all tags
2026
MCP Strategies on AWS, Part 2: Tool Design in Code
From Columbo to Coworker
🎬 Also available as a blog walkthrough video with narrated diagrams. TL;DR: Running many interactive AI agents at once feels like Lieutenant Columbo lives in your terminal: every few minutes one turns…
MCP Strategies on AWS, Part 1: Reading the Whole Guide
🎬 Also available as a blog walkthrough video with narrated diagrams. TL;DR: AWS published a Prescriptive Guidance paper, “Model Context Protocol strategies on AWS,” that organizes MCP into three pilla…
CLI vs MCP, Part Two: The First Gap Just Closed
TL;DR: In March I argued the CLI vs MCP debate was the wrong debate, and that the CLI’s advantages were a temporary artifact of training data, not a law of physics. One of those advantages was multi-a…
Why Your Cheapest Model Should Write the Harness
TL;DR: A May 2026 paper separates two capabilities that self-improving agents usually conflate: writing harness updates and benefiting from them. Writing is flat across model tiers: a 9B open model pr…
Architecting Skills: How Code Makes AI Agents More Reliable Over Time
TL;DR: An agent skill starts life as a markdown file full of instructions. It works, sometimes. Then you watch it fail in ways that are hard to predict, and you notice a pattern: the steps that break …
Your Agent's Skills Are Bounded Contexts (Design Them Like It)
TL;DR: My AWS colleague Dennis Traub made the case that Domain-Driven Design’s Ubiquitous Language is now critical infrastructure for AI agents. I want to take that one layer up, into architecture. Af…
AI-Assisted Talk Prep: The Recording-Analysis-Iterate Loop
TL;DR: I prepared my AWS Summit Hamburg talk through 6 recorded dry runs, each analyzed by a structured AI skill. The skill transcribes via Amazon Transcribe, counts fillers with word-level timestamps…
Intelligence Is Collective, Not Artificial
TL;DR: Michael I. Jordan, the man Science magazine named “the world’s most influential computer scientist,” has never considered himself an AI researcher. His thesis: intelligence is not a property of…
Your AI Judge Needs a Judge
TL;DR: Most teams ship LLM judges without testing them against human labels. The result: judges that are confidently, consistently wrong on 30%+ of cases. Hamel Husain’s “critique shadowing” methodolo…
Announcements Fade. Experiences Stick. — My AWS Summit Hamburg 2026 Recap
TL;DR: AWS Summit Hamburg 2026 was two days of community, conversations, and agentic AI everywhere. My talk on production challenges landed well — the question that stuck was about getting business pe…
When AI Joins the Team: Observations from a 3-Day Hack Event
Seven Teams, One Vision TL;DR: Seven teams built an AI-driven audio product in three days. AI agents didn’t replace human collaboration — they amplified individual speed, shifting the bottleneck to co…
Is the AI Subsidy Era Ending? And Why That Might Be a Good Thing
I was listening to a recent episode of The AI Daily Brief — “The AI Subsidy Era Is Over” — and my thoughts started spinning. Not because the argument was new, but because it connected dots I’d been se…
The Agent Security Stack Nobody Is Building
The Scenario Nobody Planned For It’s 11 PM. Your customer support agent, the AI one, is processing a refund request. It queries the order database, pulls the customer’s payment history, and calls the …
The AI Track at AWS Summit Hamburg 2026: From Demo to Deployment
Last year, I wrote about the dedicated Gen AI track at AWS Summit Hamburg 2025. The response was overwhelming — the track was packed, conversations spilled into the hallways, and the Fischbrötchen at …
MCP Sampling & Elicitation: When Servers Talk Back
From Request-Response to Collaboration When I wrote about the CLI vs MCP debate [1], I focused on the infrastructure patterns underneath. But MCP itself has been evolving, and the latest additions cha…
Self-Improving Models: What MiniMax M2.7 Actually Does
The Headline vs The Reality “Model trains itself over 100+ autonomous cycles.” That was the headline when MiniMax released M2.7 on March 18, 2026 [1]. It sounds like science fiction: a model bootstrap…
Fischbrötchen and Failure Rates — I'm Speaking at AWS Summit Hamburg
Fischbrötchen and Failure Rates Last year, the AWS Summit left Berlin for Hamburg. After years of presenting at the Berlin Summit, I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about the move. Then I opened the Generati…
From Cloud-Native to AI-Native: What Actually Changes
The Fifteen-Year Echo Fifteen years apart. Same stage. Different world. In 2010, Adrian Cockcroft stood on the QCon stage and told the audience that Netflix was running its entire business on a public…
The Protocol We Should Have Built for Humans
Namaste from 6,165 Meters I just summited Imja Tse (Island Peak, 6,165 meters) in Nepal. No Slack, no email, no MCP servers crashing in the background. Just ice, thin air, and the kind of clarity that…
Security Is Job Zero — Even (Especially) in the Age of Coding Agents
$20 and Two Hours On February 28, 2026, security startup CodeWall gave an autonomous AI agent a single input: a domain name. Two hours and approximately $20 in API tokens later, the agent had full rea…
AI Coding Productivity: 10%, Not 10x
The Number Nobody Wants to Hear A few weeks ago, I wrote about running my entire workday through an AI agent [1], meetings, research, CRM, content creation. Eight hours of productive work, not a singl…
CLI vs MCP: The Wrong Debate
The Zombie Processes and the 50GB Cache A few weeks ago, I noticed my MacBook was sluggish. I found orphaned MCP server processes that had failed to shut down cleanly, a problem Didier Durand describe…
The Coding Agent That Doesn't Code
The Friday That Wrote Itself Last Friday, I used a coding agent for eight hours straight. I didn’t write a single line of code. I prepared a customer meeting by pulling context from Slack threads, cal…