The AI-First Engineering Team — 30-Day Blog
A 30-day series on what changes when an engineering team — not just an individual engineer — adopts AI as a first-class part of how they work. From culture and workflows to governance and the human side.
Akash Talole
30 Days of AI Engineering — My Content Plan as a Lead AI Engineer
A structured 30-day blog roadmap covering Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Copilot Studio, agentic AI, coding agents, and AI in SDLC — from a Lead AI Engineer with 11 years of experience.
Multi-Model Orchestration — SLM + LLM Hybrid Architectures
The 2026 pattern for cost-efficient production agents: small language models handle simple tasks cheaply, large models handle complex tasks well. How to design the routing layer, what to measure, and what the cost-quality tradeoffs actually look like.
Reasoning Models for Agents — When Thinking Tokens Are Worth It
Reasoning models think before responding — generating extended chain-of-thought that improves accuracy on hard problems at the cost of latency and tokens. When the thinking investment pays off, and when it doesn't.
Computer Use Agents — The New Agentic Paradigm
Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.4 can control computers — take screenshots, click buttons, fill forms, navigate applications. Computer use agents open use cases that tool-calling can't reach. The capabilities, the risks, and where they actually fit.
Stateful Agents — Managing State in Production
Stateless agents are easy to build and fragile in production. Long-running tasks, multi-turn conversations, and recovery from failures all require explicit state management. The patterns that make agents durable.
Evaluating RAG Pipelines — The Metrics That Matter
Most RAG systems are deployed without a proper evaluation framework. Teams discover quality problems from user complaints rather than metrics. The evaluation metrics, frameworks, and test set design that make RAG quality measurable.
Chunking Strategies That Actually Work in Production RAG
How you split documents determines what your RAG system can find. Fixed-size chunking is the beginner approach. Semantic chunking, parent-document retrieval, and document-type-aware splitting are what production systems actually use.
Vector Databases in 2026 — Which to Use and When
The vector database landscape has matured. Qdrant, pgvector, Weaviate, and Pinecone each have a clear profile. Here's the decision framework based on scale, existing infrastructure, and query patterns — not benchmarks.
Context Window Management in Production Agents
Context windows are finite even at 100K+ tokens. Long-running agents accumulate state, conversation history, and tool outputs that eventually overflow the window. The strategies that keep production agents working correctly over time.