Notes from the lab
Engineering posts, AI-native patterns, and post-mortems from building products with AI tools. Short, honest, and tied to actual systems we've put into production.
- 5 min readBy Dhaval Nagar
Business Developers: The New Category
There's a new kind of developer emerging — not citizen developers, not no-code users. Domain experts with 10–30 years inside their field who finally have the tools to ship. Here's what they're using, and what the platform that wins this category will need to get right.
AI no-codevibe codingbusiness developersplatform strategynew SDE patternsRead post - 5 min readBy Dhaval Nagar
The Month-Three Moment: Why AI Projects Stop Being About AI
By month three, AI projects stop being about AI. They're about who spent what, on what, and whether it produced anything. Teams that can't defend the bill lose them in the next budget cycle. Here's what to build instead.
AI economicsFinOpsengineering metricsproduction AIcost attributionRead post - 5 min readBy Dhaval Nagar
Your Agent's Blast Radius Is a Credential Problem, Not an AI Problem
PocketOS lost their production database in nine seconds last month. The cause wasn't a hallucination — it was a domain management token sitting in the wrong file. Here's the architectural fix.
agent securityagentic codingIAMproduction incidentsblast radiusRead post - 10 min readBy Dhaval Nagar
AI Studio + Antigravity 2.0: A Builder's Tour
What's actually new in Google's AI development stack — AI Studio and Antigravity 2.0 — how to use each feature, and what the demo glosses over that real builders still have to handle themselves.
Google AI StudioGoogle AntigravityAI toolstools roundupagentic IDEsRead post - 6 min readBy Dhaval Nagar
Tokens Are Not the Metric
Uber burned its entire 2026 AI budget in four months on Claude Code. Microsoft did the same and switched to its own product. Both stories are about a measurement mistake, not an AI cost problem.
AI economicsengineering metricsClaude Codeproduction AIkeeping sanityRead post - 5 min readBy Dhaval Nagar
The AI Buzzword Cycle: 'Agent Sandbox' Edition
Every few months the favorite AI keyword changes. 'Agentic' became 'scaffolding' became 'harness' became 'agent sandbox' — each one a real engineering concept stretched until it meant almost nothing.
AI vocabularyagentskeeping sanityengineering cultureRead post - 5 min readBy Dhaval Nagar
When to Build an Agent (And When You're Just Building a Workflow With Extra Steps)
The checklist tells you whether an agent is appropriate. Not whether it's buildable in your environment, with your team, for your users.
agentsagentic workflowsarchitectureproduction AIRead post - 4 min readBy Dhaval Nagar
Flash Beats Pro. Your Model Router Doesn't Know That.
Gemini 3.5 Flash now leads on agent benchmarks — but at 6× the price of its Flash predecessor. The tier system you built your router on is obsolete.
model routingLLM pricingGeminiagentic workflowsarchitectureRead post - 4 min readBy Dhaval Nagar
Why we are here, in 2026
Something genuinely new is happening in software development. 2026 is when it stopped being theoretical — and where the execution gap got the widest.
introAI-native engineering2026Read post
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Short engineering posts — new SDE patterns, AI tools in practice, honest mistakes. A couple a week. No spam, unsubscribe any time.