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The weekly strip · 102 issues · page 3 of 9

What shipped, and what to build with it

One post a week on the AI models and tools that matter to people shipping products: dates, prices, limits, and what I would actually use. Primary sources only.

  1. Issue 78

    10 October 2026 · From the case files · 7 min read

    Getting 100 Lighthouse on Astro for a real marketing site

    How the Incresco and Camped sites reached 100% Lighthouse on Astro and Storyblok, and what Astro's docs say about images, fonts and islands for the same goal.

    • Astro
    • Lighthouse
    • performance
    • Storyblok
    • page builders
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  2. Issue 77

    10 October 2026 · From the case files · 6 min read

    Prospect Uploader: 10,000 leads per CSV with validation in every language

    Why EF Academy's lead uploads moved from direct CSV imports to a Lambda and EventBridge pipeline with multilingual validation, email alerts and a Prospect Viewer.

    • AWS Lambda
    • EventBridge
    • Salesforce
    • data validation
    • serverless
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  3. Issue 76

    10 October 2026 · From the case files · 6 min read

    Running a 23-language Next.js and Storyblok site as the only engineer

    EF Academy's marketing site serves 1.25M+ monthly users in 23+ languages with one engineer. The decision that mattered: let content teams run localisation themselves.

    • Next.js
    • Storyblok
    • i18n
    • localisation
    • sole engineer
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  4. Issue 75

    10 October 2026 · From the case files · 6 min read

    Replacing TIBCO Scribe with AWS Glue before the licence ran out

    How I moved EF Academy's Salesforce pipelines off a $24,000-a-year Tibco Scribe licence onto AWS Glue before it expired: the options, the plan, the cutover, $840.

    • AWS Glue
    • TIBCO
    • migration
    • cost
    • Salesforce
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  5. Issue 74

    10 October 2026 · Building with AI · 7 min read

    Text-to-speech product tours with Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS in Next.js

    Generate product-tour narration with Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS at build time, cache the audio by content hash, and ship it accessibly. Cost maths and a copyable script.

    • Gemini TTS
    • Next.js
    • accessibility
    • text to speech
    • build-time generation
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  6. Issue 73

    10 October 2026 · Building with AI · 7 min read

    Voice agents with Gemini Live: turn-taking, barge-in and latency

    How the Gemini Live API handles turns, interruptions and sessions, which latency knobs the docs give you, and a minimal browser client with ephemeral tokens.

    • voice agents
    • Gemini Live
    • WebRTC
    • barge-in
    • WebSocket
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  7. Issue 72

    10 October 2026 · Building with AI · 7 min read

    Hosted APIs vs open weights for a product team: five questions

    Data residency, cost at volume, who is on call, quality and speed of change: five questions that decide hosted API or open weights, with a break-even sketch to copy.

    • open weights
    • self-hosting
    • decision
    • data residency
    • LLM pricing
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  8. Issue 71

    10 October 2026 · Building with AI · 7 min read

    Model migration playbook: Sonnet 4.5 to 5.5 without regressions

    Sonnet 4.5 retires on 30 November 2026. What breaks, what the bill does once tokens and thinking change, how to eval the move, and how to roll back.

    • migration
    • Claude Sonnet 5.5
    • evals
    • prompt caching
    • cost optimisation
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  9. Issue 70

    10 October 2026 · Building with AI · 7 min read

    AI feature flags: rolling out model upgrades safely

    A model ID is a config value that behaves like a code deploy. Bucket by conversation, shadow first, watch tokens and refusals, and keep the old model until retirement.

    • feature flags
    • rollout
    • model upgrades
    • OpenFeature
    • Claude Sonnet 5.5
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  10. Issue 69

    10 October 2026 · Building with AI · 8 min read

    Prompt injection through tool results and documents: a builder's defence

    Indirect prompt injection arrives inside tool results, emails and OCR text, not from your user. What OWASP, Anthropic and Willison advise, plus a screening call to copy.

    • prompt injection
    • security
    • agents
    • OWASP
    • tool use
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  11. Issue 68

    10 October 2026 · Building with AI · 8 min read

    Red-teaming your own AI feature in an afternoon

    A four-hour plan, a 30-case attack set and a small Python harness with canary tokens, mapped to the OWASP LLM Top 10 and Anthropic's guidance on prompt injection.

    • red teaming
    • security
    • prompt injection
    • OWASP
    • Claude Haiku 5.5
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  12. Issue 67

    10 October 2026 · Building with AI · 7 min read

    Testing LLM features: snapshot tests, eval sets and CI budgets

    What to run per pull request and what to run nightly, plus how to cap the bill: snapshot the prompt, not the answer, and gate on a small eval set. With GitHub Actions.

    • testing
    • CI
    • evals
    • GitHub Actions
    • LLM
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