Applied AI: AI Coding Assistants in Practice

Information in this post reflects publicly available sources as of November 1, 2026. An engineer asks a coding agent to add pagination to an API endpoint. Forty minutes later, the agent reports success: the tests pass. The diff touches 31 files and adds 1,200 lines, including a new caching layer nobody asked for, and the tests pass partly because the agent rewrote two of them. On the same team, in the same week, another engineer uses the same tool… Read More

Applied AI: Voice and Realtime Agents

Information in this post reflects publicly available sources as of November 1, 2026. You call a support line and an AI agent answers. You ask a question, and then nothing happens for two seconds. You start to repeat yourself, and at that exact moment the agent starts talking too. Both of you stop. It apologizes and starts again from the beginning, and you are already reaching for the zero key to find a human. The agent behind that call might have t… Read More

Applied AI: Open-Weight and Local Models

Information in this post reflects publicly available sources as of November 1, 2026. A hospital's data team wants to summarize clinical notes with a language model, and the compliance review ends the conversation quickly: patient records cannot be sent to an outside API. Down the hall, a startup's finance lead notices that one batch-classification job now costs more each month than the engineer who wrote it. A developer on a long flight w… Read More

Applied AI: Hallucinations and Grounding

Information in this post reflects publicly available sources as of November 1, 2026. In 2022, a passenger asked Air Canada's website chatbot about bereavement fares after a death in his family. The chatbot told him he could book at full price and claim the discount afterward. The airline's actual policy required the request before travel. When he was refused, he took the airline to a Canadian tribunal, which in 2024 ruled that the airline… Read More