The weekly strip · 102 issues · page 6 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.
- Issue 42
10 October 2026 · Building with AI · 7 min read
Human-in-the-loop by design: confidence thresholds and review queues
Use model confidence to route work to people, then size the queue, set the SLA and feed corrections back into evals. Managed review tools are closing, so build your own.
- human in the loop
- review queues
- confidence
- TypeSafe Jev
- evals
- Issue 41
10 October 2026 · Building with AI · 6 min read
Agentic workflows in enterprise apps: a control loop for production
Plan, act, verify, escalate: budgets, idempotency keys, permission hooks and audit logs for an agent that touches enterprise systems, built on documented SDK features.
- agents
- enterprise
- workflow
- idempotency
- audit logs
- Issue 40
10 October 2026 · Building with AI · 7 min read
Agent tool design: schemas that models call correctly
Naming, descriptions, parameter types and error returns for agent tools, checked against the Claude and Gemini docs, plus the forced tool-call change on Claude 5.5.
- tool use
- function calling
- agents
- Claude
- Gemini
- Issue 39
10 October 2026 · Building with AI · 7 min read
Golden datasets: how to build 200 labelled examples in a week
A day-by-day plan for 200 labelled examples: sampling, labelling guidelines, adjudication, splits and versioning, plus the arithmetic on what 200 can and cannot prove.
- evals
- labelling
- datasets
- golden dataset
- LLM-as-judge
- Issue 38
10 October 2026 · Building with AI · 8 min read
Evals before agents: the smallest useful eval harness for a product team
An 85-line Python harness with a dataset, code checks, an LLM judge and a report, plus what to measure first and how much a pass rate on 100 cases can tell you.
- evals
- testing
- LLM
- Issue 37
10 October 2026 · Building with AI · 8 min read
Hybrid search: BM25 plus embeddings plus a reranker, and how to measure it
Why keyword search still earns a place, how reciprocal rank fusion merges it with embeddings, what rerankers cost, and an eval harness to run on your own data.
- hybrid search
- BM25
- reranking
- Issue 36
10 October 2026 · Building with AI · 6 min read
Milvus vs pgvector for a team of four
Milvus or pgvector? Index types, filtering behaviour, the 2,000-dimension index limit and the operational footprint, read from both projects' own docs.
- Milvus
- pgvector
- vector database
- Issue 35
10 October 2026 · Building with AI · 7 min read
Chunking is a product decision: sizes, overlap and the cost per query
Chunk size sets what the model reads, what you store and what each query costs. The evidence on size and overlap, a priced table, and a harness to test your own.
- RAG
- chunking
- embeddings
- Issue 34
10 October 2026 · Building with AI · 7 min read
RAG in 2026: when retrieval is optional, and when it is still the whole product
Every current Claude model has a 1M-token window and cached reads cost 5% of input. When to skip retrieval, when not to, with a priced 150k-token example.
- RAG
- long context
- retrieval
- Issue 33
10 October 2026 · Model watch · 7 min read
AI coding agents in late 2026: Claude Code, Codex and Antigravity compared
As of 10 October 2026: what Claude Code, OpenAI Codex and Google Antigravity are, which models and plans sit behind them, and how to run a fair bake-off.
- Claude Code
- Codex
- Antigravity
- coding agents
- pricing
- Issue 32
10 October 2026 · Model watch · 7 min read
Open-weight models in late 2026: where Llama, Mistral and Qwen stand
As of 10 Oct 2026: Qwen3.8 and Mistral Small 4 are open, Mistral Large 4 is API-only for now, and Meta has nothing newer than Llama 4. Licences and when to self-host.
- open weights
- Llama
- Mistral
- Qwen
- licences
- Issue 31
10 October 2026 · Model watch · 7 min read
The Claude API speed setting: what 'fast' does and when to pay for it
As of 10 October 2026, speed: fast gives Opus 5.5 up to 2.5x output tokens per second at twice the price. What it does, what it breaks, and when it pays.
- Claude API
- fast mode
- latency
- pricing
- Claude Opus 5.5