Engineering notes from the field.
Essays and field notes on AI, software engineering, design, and the craft of building product teams that ship. Written by the engineers doing the work.
Google Ships Nano Banana 2 Lite: $0.034/Image, 4-Second Latency
Google shipped Nano Banana 2 Lite and Gemini Omni Flash on June 30 — image gen at $0.034 per 1K image, video at $0.10 per second, all watermarked.
OpenAI + Broadcom Ship Jalapeño: Custom Inference Silicon Late 2026
OpenAI and Broadcom unveiled Jalapeño on June 24 — a reticle-sized LLM-optimized ASIC taped out in nine months, targeting deployment by year-end.
Z.ai Ships ZCode + GLM-5.2: Open-Weights Coding at 1/6 the Cost
Z.ai released GLM-5.2 as MIT-licensed open weights on June 13, launched ZCode desktop IDE, and beat GPT-5.5 on long-horizon coding at 1/6 the cost.
Microsoft's MAI-Code-1-Flash Ships GA on Copilot Enterprise
Microsoft's in-house coding model went GA on Copilot Business + Enterprise June 26: $0.75/$4.50 per M, 51.2% SWE-Bench Pro, admin policy required.
MCP 2026-07-28 Ships Stateless Core, Tasks, and MCP Apps
The July 28 MCP spec ships a stateless core, the Tasks extension, MCP Apps, and OAuth/OIDC-aligned auth — Tier-1 SDKs must land inside the ten-week window.
Claude Code Plugin Marketplace Hits 125+ Curated and Community
Anthropic's May 22 plugin directory matured into 55+ curated plus 70+ community plugins — install collapses to one /plugin command wiring MCP and skills.