🤖 My First Win Building with AI Agents
A thoughtful reflection on AI-assisted development that highlights the shift from hype to disciplined, practical agent use in real projects.
Facundo Olano shares his first successful experience developing a Django-based book trading web app powered by Claude Code. After earlier mixed results with AI coding tools, he adopts a disciplined approach—precise prompting, strategic agent orchestration, thorough code review, and rigorous testing. The piece explores the trade-offs, costs, and real-world promise of agentic programming when used responsibly.
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🧩 LeaseGuard: Rethinking Raft Leader Leases
An excellent technical contribution that could shape future best practices in distributed consensus and high-availability system design.
LeaseGuard introduces a refined design for leader leases in the Raft consensus algorithm, created by MongoDB’s Distributed Systems Research Group. By redefining the log itself as the lease, it simplifies failover, enhances consistency, and improves system recovery. The team validated their approach using TLA+ and experiments showing notable gains in throughput and fault recovery.
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🧮 Finite-State Transducers for Substitution Tilings
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🎵 8-bit Boléro: The World’s Most Ambitious Chiptune
A stunning fusion of art and engineering that redefines what vintage hardware can achieve in digital music.
Engineer-musician Linus Åkesson reconstructed Ravel’s ‘Boléro’ entirely with custom-built 8-bit instruments—modified C64s and NES hardware. The months-long project culminated in a synchronized performance video showcasing masterful precision and retro-tech craftsmanship.
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⚡ Prompt Caching: Making LLM Inference 10× Cheaper
A clear and technically rich breakdown that connects LLM theory with real-world cost and performance optimization.
This ngrok article unpacks how prompt caching slashes the cost and latency of large language model inference. It clarifies what transformers actually cache—the key and value matrices—and compares implementations from OpenAI and Anthropic. A deep yet practical explanation of how token processing, embeddings, and attention interact during reuse.
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