Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
RWE-bench: Real World Engineering Bench
Xplore launches RWE-bench, a benchmark of 20 expert-designed mechanical, electrical and aerospace engineering tasks (crankshaft CAD, DDR3 PCB routing, turbine-vane CFD) graded by deterministic physics-based verifiers with no LLM judge. Across 11 frontier models, GPT-6 Astra leads at a 37% average pass rate, Claude Opus 5.5 scores 29% and GPT-6.1 Sol 25% at about $10 a run; five models score 0%.
5 min · 1,145 words
Animations for System Builders: Metastability and Lost Writes
Marc Brooker shows how LLM-built animations backed by real test traces help build intuition for distributed-systems failures, including how a Raft cluster can lose writes when one node's storage lies, and metastable failure.
2 min · 509 words
SBD: We Have a Filesystem at Home
Fly.io's Daniel Botha introduces the Sprites Block Device (SBD), a simpler object-storage-backed block device that replaces the clever custom filesystem Sprites launched with, explaining why dumber checkpoints and 'just a disk' made Sprites more reliable.
6 min · 1,282 words
Whatever Happened to Fire Escapes?
Practical Engineering traces the history of the external iron fire escape in American cities, why it became the default retrofit after early fire egress laws, the problems that made it unreliable, and how building codes shifted to protected interior stairwells and other egress designs, with the tradeoffs regulation creates.
10 min · 2,407 words
What requirements don't you have?
Sean Goedecke argues that elegant software design comes from identifying requirements you can drop, such as fresh data, concurrent writes, or low tail latency, citing Unicorn, S3, StatsD, SQLite, and Cursor's git backend, and warns that unchecked consistency demands petrify systems.
5 min · 1,096 words
Evolving the cloud-native foundation for the next generation of AI
Microsoft Azure describes how it is advancing cloud-native infrastructure so organizations can build, run, and optimize applications and agents at scale for the next generation of AI workloads.
7 min · 1,552 words
What is a forward deployed engineer, and do you need one?
Denys Zaichenko explains what forward deployed engineers actually do inside customer teams, how they differ from solutions engineers, and when a company needs one.
6 min · 1,404 words
Postgres DELETE Can Actually Scale
DBOS explains how Postgres actually deletes rows and how it made workflow retention deletes scale: batched deletes of the oldest workflows, dropping foreign keys so tables are cleaned in phases, debugging a 20-minute index lookup, and why it chose DELETE over dropping partitions.
7 min · 1,532 words
What changes when your search index lives on S3?
Infino explains how putting a full-text search index on object storage changes the cost and latency model: every random read is a billed GET taking tens of milliseconds, and how superfiles, manifests and careful layout keep agent queries fast without packing the working set on local disks.
9 min · 2,019 words
How the Claude Code team does code review
With Claude writing about 90 percent of Claude Code's own code, the team describes a layered review flow: verification before review, AI review on every pull request, blocking security and automated checks, risk-scaled human approval, merge queues, flags, gradual release and fast rollback. Merged PRs more than doubled from June to September while the revert share fell over 40 percent.
15 min · 3,429 words
You Won't Believe The Incredible Engineering That Allows Articulated Buses To Bend
Every day, countless people around the world board a bus to travel to a destination. These buses come in all shapes and sizes, from comfortable coaches to towering double-deckers. One of the best ways to increase a coach’s passenger capacity without adding height is to build the bus in at least two sections, adding a pivot point near the middle. The articulated bus is a common sight everywhere, but how they actually work, especially when they have a rear engine, is far more clever and interesting than you might think. A lot of these buses put brilliant engineering in…
11 min · 2,574 words
How we built AI agent behavior drift analysis with Cloudflare Clef
David Mytton explains how Arcjet monitors AI coding agent sessions in real time, detecting risky actions, session tainting and behavior drift from indirect prompt injection using Cloudflare's Clef decision model.
9 min · 1,997 words
E2exe: How we solved Windows desktop automation for enterprise scale
QA Wolf explains how it parallelizes Windows desktop app tests at scale: single-use VMs from warm pools on Google Compute Engine, driven from Linux over CDP and Appium, with one API across web, mobile and desktop.
10 min · 2,225 words
Inside Slipstream’s Recall Pattern
Glide’s engineering team explains Slipstream’s recall pattern for handing six types of rote engineering maintenance work to AI agents: how issues are detected, recalled into agent workflows, verified, and measured, with the numbers they are seeing in production.
9 min · 2,016 words
Building a Linearizable Log on READ COMMITTED Isolation
Materialize describes how a metastable incident under PostgreSQL SERIALIZABLE led them to build a linearizable metadata log on READ COMMITTED isolation, achieving 3x write throughput, backed by a Lean 4 proof.
20 min · 4,657 words
Zero to Calc in Six Days: Inside XBOW’s Chrome Full Chain
XBOW walks through the Chrome full-chain exploit its AI agents built in six days, chaining a V8 compiler bug, an animated-WebP decoder bug and a Crashpad memory-safety bug to escape the renderer sandbox, which earned Google's first $250,000 full-chain reward under its April 2026 VRP rules, plus lessons for LLM-era vulnerability research.
17 min · 3,973 words
Rewinding the exponential: How we keep hardware usage down
Cloudflare’s Data team explains how it reined in an exponentially growing analytics pipeline—rewinding retention, compression, and query patterns—so hardware and cost stay sustainable while more than 20% of the web sits behind its network.
10 min · 2,215 words
Redesigning source control at Anthropic
Anthropic explains how merges to its monorepo grew from about 2,500 to over 30,000 per day in 2026, why git hosting became the bottleneck, and how it built and migrated to Scion, an in-house version control system, in five months, plus lessons and ideas for the wider git ecosystem.
16 min · 3,745 words
Three weeks of agentic refactoring: could we trust the result?
A case study of three weeks refactoring DATAMIMIC CE with coding agents: how a before/after verification harness was silently testing new code via an editable-install finder, which results were voided, the architecture guardrails used, and what the team will change next.
6 min · 1,375 words
Turn a WiFi 7 Router into a 320Msps Software Defined Radio Receiver
A GitHub project that repurposes a WiFi 7 router as a ~320 Msps software-defined radio receiver, documenting the hardware path, sampling approach, and how to get RF samples out of commodity WLAN silicon.
5 min · 1,059 words