Most AI content shows tools and APIs. These series focus on something slightly different: why the patterns exist, what problem they solve, where they break, and the engineering judgment that separates working systems from demos.
Newest
- AI Agents in Practice — Part 2: What Makes Something an Agent
- AI Agents in Practice — Part 1: The Demo Worked. Production Didn't.
- RAG in Practice — Part 8: RAG in Production — What Breaks After Launch
Choose a Path
MCP in Practice — Read from the beginning (complete, 9 parts)
How AI applications connect to tools, data, and external systems — from first principles to local builds to production concerns.
You'll leave knowing: why connecting AI to systems is harder than it looks, what MCP actually standardizes, and how to build and harden a working MCP server.
Four waypoints through the series:
- Part 1 — Why connecting AI to real systems is still hard
- Part 5 — Build your first MCP server (and client)
- Part 6 — Your MCP server worked locally. What changes in production?
- Part 9 — From concepts to a hands-on example
RAG in Practice — Read from the beginning (complete, 8 parts)
How retrieval-augmented generation actually works, where it fails, and how to build and reason about it step by step.
You'll leave knowing: why RAG exists, what chunking and retrieval actually decide, how to build a working pipeline from scratch, and what breaks once it goes to production.
Four waypoints through the series:
- Part 1 — Why AI gets things wrong
- Part 3 — How RAG works: the complete pipeline
- Part 5 — Build a RAG system in practice
- Part 8 — RAG in production: what breaks after launch
AI Agents in Practice — Read from the beginning (in progress, 2 of 8 parts live)
What makes a system an agent, why demos break in production, and how to build agents that hold up — a control loop with tools, state, and boundaries.
You'll leave knowing: why the same model that aces a demo confidently does the wrong thing in production, what an agent actually is in engineering terms, and how the three primitives — MCP for acting, RAG for knowing, Skills for following reusable procedures — compose into a working system.
Live parts:
More coming through summer 2026.
Where to Start
New here? → MCP Part 1, RAG Part 1, or Agents Part 1
Want to build something? → MCP Part 5 or RAG Part 5
Care about the decisions? → MCP Part 4 or RAG Part 6
Care about production? → MCP Part 6 or RAG Part 8
If this kind of practical AI writing is useful to you, this page is the easiest way to see what exists.
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