Field Signal · Curated Reading
The Engineering
Signal.
High-signal field notes, architecture teardowns, and engineering writing from 50 publications. A focused reading queue for becoming a stronger end-to-end engineer. Updated 20 Aug.
How AgentFlo built AI sales agents with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore – Part 1
Learn how AgentFlo built always-on AI sales agents on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and the Strands Agents SDK. Part 1 covers three pillars of production-grade agents—velocity, standardization, and scalability—including recipe-based deployment, tool routing through AgentCore Gateway, and elastic, statefu...
Citizens Build, Agents Execute, Experts Govern
TL;DR Why building an app over the weekend isn't the same as building enterprise software I’ve noticed an interesting gap opening up over the last six months. It isn’t really a gap in technology. It’s a gap in what different people think software engineering actually is. The conversation usually sta...
Practitioner Voice: The Writing Category Nobody has Named Yet
Jim Highsmith recognizes that effective writing from a practitioner is a style distinct from academic writing or thought-leadership content. It's a style that I advocate, and my contributors mostly follow. Jim decided it was important to give it a name, and identify what makes it distinctive. more…
GraphRAG: How AI Answers Questions Hidden Across Many Documents
GraphRAG was designed to handle the second kind of questions, and we are going to learn more about it in this article.
How Clario technology detects PHI/PII in DICOM images using Amazon Bedrock
Clario, part of Thermo Fisher Scientific, uses Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Textract to automatically detect protected health information (PHI) and personally identifiable information (PII) across thousands of DICOM image slices in clinical trials, covering both metadata tags and text burned into the i...
The Pulse: Grok’s CLI caught uploading all your local files to the cloud
Devs discover that Grok CLI pushed all local files, .env files and git history have been pushed to a GCP bucket, unencrypted. SpaceX’s initial reaction? Blame the devs
AI-powered clinical trial eligibility and safety using Amazon Bedrock AgentCore
AI agents built on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore help clinical trial teams make fast, accurate enrollment decisions while keeping clinicians in control. This post shows how to architect an eligibility and safety screening agent using AWS HealthLake, AgentCore, and AgentCore Evaluations.
The New American AI Model Designed to be Customized
In this article, we will work through the various choices Thinking Machines made while building Inkling.
Fragments: August 18
Part of the reason why I’m at Thoughtworks is because I’d like to see a software development organization founded on technical excellence as an example for the rest of the industry. The trouble is that I have little aptitude or inclination for the hard work of building such an organization. So I rel...
Consistency is the new latency: AI at the data layer
As AI agents move from chatbots to taking action, their reliability depends on the consistency of the data layer beneath them. This post examines how replication lag poisons an agent's context and shows how to match Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Keyspaces replication models to each task...
Waymo vs Tesla: Two Ways to Build Self-Driving Cars
In this article, we will take a look at both approaches.
EP222: What is Google’s TPU?
A TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) is Google’s custom AI chip, designed from scratch for the giant matrix multiplications that modern models live on. GPUs were built for graphics first.
Serverless vehicle tracking at scale: Bosch L.OS on AWS
Learn how Bosch Mobility Platform Solutions built L.OS, a serverless vehicle tracking platform on AWS that unifies India's fragmented spot logistics market into a single real-time visibility layer using Amazon ECS, AWS Lambda, and Amazon MSK.
Track generative AI costs with Amazon Bedrock inference profiles
Learn how to track generative AI costs by department using Amazon Bedrock application inference profiles and AWS cost allocation tags. Create tagged profiles for each team and view per-department cost breakdowns in AWS Cost Explorer.
A Detailed Guide to API Composition Techniques
In this article, we are going to dive deep into the area of the API composition problem and the patterns associated with it.
Recovery strategies to meet data residency requirements
Learn three strategies for achieving disaster recovery while meeting data residency requirements. Ranging from encryption-based controls on multi-Region replication to fully in-country architectures, these patterns help you balance recovery objectives with regulatory constraints.
Reducing Text2SQL latency with parameterized query templates
Learn how parameterized query templates reduced Text2SQL latency by 80% and cut token consumption by over 50%. This post covers the architecture behind an intelligent caching layer that uses semantic similarity to match user questions to SQL templates, bypassing expensive LLM calls.
Adobe Firefly: Simplified observability with Amazon Managed Prometheus
Learn how Adobe Firefly achieved 28x faster GPU metric queries by migrating from self-managed Prometheus to Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, with improvements in query performance, infrastructure reliability, and operational efficiency.
GitHub vs Vercel vs Replit: What Dev Platforms Do When AI Code Is Cheap
AI models have solved the writing code part of software development to a great extent.
Scaling patterns for self-organizing multi-agent clusters with Kiro
Learn how to coordinate AI agents through shared state in Amazon S3 instead of a central orchestrator. Deploy and observe self-organizing agent clusters on Amazon EC2 with the open-source kiro-flock reference implementation.
How Cloudflare Is Making AI Pay for Content
In this article, we will go through Cloudflare’s solution in the following five steps.
TDD inside the agent loop - theater or actual value?
My colleagues at Thoughtworks tend to be big fans of Test-Driven Development, and many people in the industry advocate telling LLM agents to use TDD when building software. Birgitta Böckeler was curious if this really makes a difference, so conducted a few experiments. more…
How to Fight Clickbait: Meta, LinkedIn & YouTube Case Studies
What does it take for a social media platform to stop rewarding clickbait content?
The Read Path versus the Write Path: Strategies and Techniques
In this article, we will look at read path and write path operations and techniques in detail.
How Big Models Teach Small Models to Be Smart
In this article, we will walk through the idea from the ground up.