Applied AI: Long-Running and Background Agents

Information in this post reflects publicly available sources as of November 1, 2026. A procurement team gives an agent a job: review 40 vendor contracts, email each vendor to confirm renewal terms, and produce a comparison by morning. Two hours in, at contract 31, the server running the agent restarts for a routine deploy. The run is gone. Someone starts it again, the bill doubles, and 30 vendors receive the same email twice. Nothing about the mod… Read More

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