Apache Kafka: The Complete Guide from Zero to Production
Author(s): Alok Ranjan Singh Originally published on Towards AI. Everything you need to understand Apache Kafka, from your first event to building scalable, fault-tolerant streaming systems. Welcome back! If you read our deep dive into Redis, you already know how to make …
What a Kernel Is, and Why Everyone Is Writing New Ones
Author(s): Satsawat Natakarnkitkul (Net) Originally published on Towards AI. What a Kernel Is, and Why Everyone Is Writing New Ones The serving stack with the kernels layer lit. Part three of seven. One layer above the silicon, and the source of most …
Eval-Driven Development: A Software Engineering Approach to Production-Grade AI Agents
Author(s): Alex Punnen Originally published on Towards AI. How to turn production traces into a continuous improvement loop using Pydantic AI, OpenTelemetry, Grafana Tempo, SeaweedFS, and LLM-as-a-judge evaluation. Repo: https://github.com/alexcpn/eval-driven-development The Agentic AI SystemThe article argues that production-grade agentic AI requires foundational …
Stop Using LLMs for Everything: Content Understanding (Read OCR) vs LLM Extraction — A Practical Comparison
Author(s): Katakamvivek Originally published on Towards AI. What 80 documents taught me about cost, latency, hallucination, and picking the right tool for document processing. Somewhere along the way, LLMs became the default answer to every document problem. Need to extract data from …
The Economics of Agents: Token Accounting, Caching, and Routing
Author(s): Shrashti Singhal Originally published on Towards AI. Your agent doesn’t have a performance problem. It has a unit-economics problem — and the fix is engineering, not a bigger budget. There’s a moment every team building agents eventually hits. I’ve started calling …
9 Agentic Harness Architectures Every AI Developer Must Know
Author(s): Divy Yadav Originally published on Towards AI. There are nine ways to wire an AI agent together, explained in plain English, with visuals. Every AI agent you’ve ever used runs on one of nine wiring diagrams. Photo from AIThe article explains …
AI Agent Deconfliction Architecture: Keep Parallel Coding Agents From Fighting Over the Same Work
Author(s): Anna Jey Originally published on Towards AI. AI Agent Deconfliction Architecture: Keep Parallel Coding Agents From Fighting Over the Same Work AI Agent Deconfliction Architecture Parallel coding agents can feel like a superpower until two sessions edit the same file, start …
The AI Job Apocalypse Is a Mirage
Author(s): Dora Moscato Originally published on Towards AI. The AI Job Apocalypse Is a Mirage All calculations are the author’s. Data accessed 15 August 2026. Disclosure: ChatGPT assisted with data processing, the production of the data visualisations and translation. Image generated by …
7 SQL Window Function Patterns Every Analyst Should Know
Author(s): Priyanka Shah Originally published on Towards AI. The queries I actually reach for at work — and the frame-clause default that quietly breaks all of them. For about a year, I wrote this query: A window function doesn’t collapse your rows. …
Stop Asking “Which AI Is Best.” Ask This Instead.
Author(s): Tarun Agarwal Originally published on Towards AI. The one question that actually predicts whether your AI subscription is worth the money — broken down by what you actually do all day. There’s a thread I keep seeing versions of, across every …
OpenCode vs Claude Code: The Complete Terminal AI Alternatives Guide (2026)
Author(s): Sage Holloway 🍓 Originally published on Towards AI. OpenCode vs Claude Code: The Complete Terminal AI Alternatives Guide (2026) Managed Claude Code vs open terminal harnesses: Tool Search, LSP loops, token economics, and when to pick OpenCode. Terminal-first AI development has …
Tool Call Orchestration: Sequential, Parallel, and DAG Execution
Author(s): Armin Norouzi, Ph.D Originally published on Towards AI. Tool Call Orchestration: Sequential, Parallel, and DAG Execution A research agent calling 6 tools sequentially waits 1,832ms at P50. The same 6 tools run in parallel — ignoring all dependencies — finish in …
Choosing Claude Model and Effort Level in Claude Code
Author(s): Udaykiran Estari Originally published on Towards AI. The Wrong Question Is ‘Which Claude Model Should I Use?’ The fastest way to waste money in Claude Code is not picking the expensive model. It is leaving effort unconstrained, watching a normal coding …
Everyone Got Faster. Nobody Got Better at Judging. That Gap Is the Whole Problem.
Author(s): Siddhant Nitin Patil Originally published on Towards AI. The most important sentence I read this month was buried in a product newsletter on August 14, and it was not presented as a finding. It was presented as an aside. AI is …
AgentFence: A Local MCP Policy Firewall for AI Agent Tool Calls
Author(s): Diogo Santos Originally published on Towards AI. Your coding agent can now touch your filesystem, GitHub, and shell. AgentFence is a single Go binary that decides allow, deny, or ask before any of it runs — no cloud, no telemetry. Your …
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