Department series
Field Notes
Timely observations — conferences, shootouts, build logs.
Crosstalk
How agents talk — to each other, to your tools, and to the world outside the box. The humans move up a level.
- Labs is the magazine home again: quarters as issues, departments as lanes, twice-weekly filing into the open issue — with the newsletter as delivery, not a second archive. — Introducing Labs · Jul 16
- The field converged from every direction on one claim: the model is no longer the bottleneck — the harness, the context, and your attention are. Even the model vendors said it from their own keynotes. — The World's Fair Report · Jul 15
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Introducing Labs
There's so much to talk about that we need a better home for it — quarterly issues, clear lanes, and a place to look back without drowning in the archive.
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What Surprised Us at the World's Fair
We read all 92 talk transcripts from the AI Engineer World's Fair 2026. The main report: what genuinely surprised us — with clips — plus six deep dives into the themes that mattered.
Dispatches
Filed from the floor — the patterns unfreeze in Miami, and the Linux moment arrives on the laptop.
- Three populations are learning agency at the same moment — people, companies, and agents. — The Miami Report · Apr 25
Instruments
Reading the gauges — before you trust an agent, you need instruments that show you when it's lying.
- The models got smart, the tools got simple, and the circle of who builds is expanding — the industry got bash-pilled. — AI Engineering Summit 2025 · Nov 22
Field Trials
Take the tools outside and see what breaks — agents become products, and products can be raced.
- The dev environment left the desk: a PWA shipped entirely from a phone, with three different agents doing the building. — Feature Development on the Go · Jun 8
- The platforms are betting on protocols, not just models — MCP, A2A, NLWeb, and the open agentic web. — Report from Microsoft Build 2025 · May 21
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Feature Development on the go
What happens when you challenge Google Jules, OpenAI Codex, and Cursor to build a PWA—using just your phone? Find out which agent delivered.
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Report from Microsoft Build 2025
Microsoft is betting big on an open, agent-powered web—where protocols like MCP, A2A, and NLWeb redefine how AI and services interact. The real opportunity in AI isn’t just smarter models, but the “capability overhang” waiting to be unlocked by better reasoning and open standards.
Blueprints
Drawing up the system — memory, MCP, structured output: the quarter the chat window stopped being the product.
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Tools for thinking. Everyday AI.
From building nuclear fusors to probing Vatican AI doctrine, this exploration reveals how AI tools are reshaping our daily intellectual work in surprisingly practical ways. Through examples of interfacing with databases, analyzing legal documents, and diving into deep research rabbit holes, we see how AI assistants are becoming intuitive research companions that expand our ability to quickly understand and synthesize complex information.
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Learning on the go with NotebookLM
By utilizing NotebookLM, an AI model capable of generating audio summaries and interactive conversations, you can create customized podcasts on-the-go. You can also join the conversation.