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.
DeepSeek V4 Ships Open Weights at 1/20 the Cost of Opus 4.7
DeepSeek V4 lands open-weights under MIT at $1.74/$3.48 per million — 1/20 the cost of Opus 4.7 — and reframes the FY27 cost-tier routing slot entirely.
Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex Compose Into a Three-Layer Coding Stack
Cursor orchestrates, Claude Code and Codex execute, cross-provider review verifies — the AI coding stack composes into three layers instead of consolidating.
Gemini 3.5 Flash Lands at Google I/O: 76% Terminal-Bench, $1.50/M
Gemini 3.5 Flash shipped at I/O 2026: 76.2% Terminal-Bench, 289 tok/s, $1.50/$9 per million — and beats last cycle's Gemini 3.1 Pro on coding.
Microsoft Ships 7 MAI Models: Hill-Climbing to Frontier Autonomy
Microsoft's June 8 MAI launch shipped seven in-house models — Thinking-1, Code-1-Flash, Image, Voice, Transcribe — the OpenAI dependency thins.
RLVR Eats RLHF: Verifiable Rewards Become the 2026 Default
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards is the dominant post-training paradigm — GRPO replaces PPO and rewards become audit-ready.
Arcade Raises $60M Series A for Secure AI Agent Action Layer
Arcade closed a $60M Series A on June 15 led by SYN Ventures, with Morgan Stanley and Wipro, lifting total funding to $72M for its secure agent-action layer.