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.
AI Data-Labeling Market Tops $2.3B as Surge AI Passes $1B ARR
The AI data-labeling and RLHF annotation market crossed $2.3 billion in 2026 at 23% growth, with Surge AI past $1B ARR as Anthropic's reference RLHF partner.
Context Engineering Replaces RAG in 60% of Q2 2026 Agent Builds
Through Q2 2026, context engineering displaced RAG as the default production LLM architecture, with 60% of new agent builds making it the primary work.
Claude Tag: Anthropic's Persistent Slack AI Writes 65% of Its Code
On June 23, 2026, Anthropic launched Claude Tag, a persistent AI teammate in Slack that works asynchronously, already writing 65% of its product-team code.
SpaceX Buys Cursor Maker Anysphere for $60B in All-Stock Deal
On June 16, 2026, SpaceX exercised an April option to acquire Anysphere, maker of Cursor, in a $60 billion all-stock deal closing Q3 2026.
Gartner Pins 2026 AI-Agent Software Spend at $206.5B, Up 139%
Gartner's June 2026 forecast pegs 2026 enterprise AI-agent software spend at $206.5 billion, a 139% jump from the $86.4B 2025 baseline.
Six Sigma Agent Paper: Consensus Voting Hits 99.99966% Reliability
An arXiv paper, the Six Sigma Agent, shows consensus-driven decomposed execution can push end-to-end LLM reliability past 99.99966% on existing frontier APIs.