66 posts tagged with "Architecture"

Context is the scarce resource in every coding agent session. Instructions, file reads, tool schemas, MCP servers, and your chat history all compete for the same window — and quality degrades before the hard limit. Part II covers how Cursor and Claude Code expect you to structure rules, skills, and session hygiene.

One disciplined agent is leverage. Ten undisciplined agents are a tax. Part IV covers parallel execution, cloud delegation, independent review, and the failure patterns that turn agentic coding into expensive thrash.

Ask-and-pray prompts turn frontier models into expensive autocomplete. The teams that ship consistently do the opposite: they force research and a reviewable plan before any file write. This article is Part I of a four-part series on working with coding agents in production.

Without a check the agent can run, “looks done” is the only stop signal — and you become the verification loop. Part III covers how Cursor and Claude Code turn tests, builds, screenshots, and hooks into an oracle that stays honest even when context degrades.

Amazon Nova is easy to underrate if you only compare it on public leaderboards against GPT-5.6 or Claude 5 — it isn't trying to win that fight. Nova's actual pitch is that if you're already an AWS shop, the model, the customisation tooling, the agent framework and the deployment surface are the same product, with the same IAM, the same billing, and the same on-call rotation. That's a genuinely different value proposition, and it's the one you should evaluate honestly rather than dismissing Nova as "the AWS also-ran."

Anthropic's Claude 5 launch is really three separate launches with one shared story: capability is moving down the price ladder faster than most teams' architecture assumes. Opus 5 landed on 24 July 2026 at the exact same price as the outgoing Opus 4.8 — $5 input / $25 output per million tokens — while offering Fable-adjacent performance on several benchmarks. If your Claude cost model still assumes "the good model is expensive," it's already out of date.

Claude Code is easy to misread as "chat that writes files." It isn't. It is an AI coding agent with an agentic loop, a context window, tools, and a permission system — you steer it through Explore → Plan → Code → Commit, then harden the workflow with CLAUDE.md, skills, subagents, MCP, and hooks.

"Sovereign AI" gets used loosely enough in vendor marketing that it's worth being precise about what Cohere's Command A+ actually offers versus what the phrase implies. Command A+ (218B and 25B, Apache 2.0) is built specifically for enterprises and governments that need to run a capable model entirely within their own infrastructure boundary — not as a philosophical statement, but as a concrete set of deployment, data-residency, and control guarantees that a hosted API fundamentally cannot provide, regardless of that API vendor's compliance certifications.

DeepSeek's real contribution to the 2026 model landscape isn't any single model — it's three specific technical ideas that the rest of the industry has since absorbed to varying degrees: Multi-head Latent Attention for cheaper KV-cache memory, Mixture-of-Experts done at extreme sparsity, and Group Relative Policy Optimisation as a reinforcement-learning method that made reasoning-focused training dramatically cheaper. If you understand those three ideas, you understand why DeepSeek mattered, and you'll recognise the same ideas (in variant form) inside half the other models in this series.

Artificial intelligence models are improving at a remarkable pace. A model released only six months ago can quickly appear less capable, less efficient and less reliable than a newer generation. It is tempting to assume that every new model is smarter because it contains more parameters — but modern frontier systems such as Claude Fable 5, Claude Opus 5, GPT-5.6, Gemini 3.6 Flash and Kimi K3 are improving through a much broader stack of advances.