ai-engineering

Sierra powers customer-experience voice agents for a large chunk of the Fortune 20, and in this Interrupt-26 conversation Zach Reneau-Wedeen (Head of Product) walks through what their production agent harness actually looks like. The headline: a voice agent in production does not look like the canonical “LLM-in-a-loop calling tools” diagram everyone draws on whiteboards. It looks like a multi-model ensemble pipeline with speculative execution baked in. “Coding agents are good at file systems — let’s materialize everything into a file system” The opening framing is a useful contrarian take: coding agents have a runaway lead on capability because they happen to operate on substrates — file systems, Git, grep — that the underlying models were already extremely good at....

Anjney Midha (AMP, formerly a16z, board member at several frontier labs) sits down with Latent Space for an hour on a question that wouldn’t have made sense in 2023: why are well-funded AI labs with all the compute they need failing to ship? His answer isn’t compute, it isn’t talent density, and it isn’t model architecture — it’s culture, mission alignment, and the boring details of execution. The diagnosis: culture, not capital Midha opens with the observation that has been circulating quietly inside frontier-lab boards for months: many of the best-funded labs of the 2024–2025 cohort have all the cash and all the compute they need and still can’t ship competitive models....

Kuba Rogut, deployed engineer at Turbopuffer, gave one of the more refreshingly direct takes on the “RAG is dead” meme that’s been making the rounds on X. His argument, in one sentence: RAG isn’t dead — what’s dead is the strawman version where RAG means “embed everything once, run a single vector lookup, dump it into the LLM context.” The actual frontier is hybrid, tool-rich retrieval, where embeddings, BM25, grep, glob, regex, and filters are all tools an agent can compose iteratively....

A short on-camera conversation between Sam Whitmore (engineer on Cursor’s cloud-agents team) and Charlie + Harry of Pause AI, recorded at Baseten and posted by Cursor as part of its agent-era publicity push. The framing is intentionally provocative — “I’ve got 64 to 128 agents working on this at any given time” — but the substance is closer to a workshop chat between three practitioners who actually live inside agent harnesses all day....

Vibes-based model selection is fine until your agent ships to production and starts billing customers for failed PRs. Ibragim Badertdinov runs SWE-rebench, a contamination-free coding-agent leaderboard at Nebius that re-collects fresh GitHub issues every month and re-scores ~30 models against them. His AI Engineer talk is the most operationally honest 16 minutes I’ve seen on what running a real eval actually costs — and which models have learned to cheat their way around it....

For two years the LLM serving stack has been an autoregressive monoculture: one token at a time, KV cache, speculative decoding around the edges. Brendon Dillon, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, used his AI Engineer slot to make the case for a different default — diffusion language models, the same family of techniques powering image and video generation, retargeted at text. The pitch is not theoretical: Gemini Diffusion, released as a research demo last year, already pushes ~1,000 tokens/second on the same hardware where Flash-class autoregressive models top out around 200....

Weekly Video Notes — a short article distilling one talk from the weekly digest. Source video and key frames embedded throughout. In this 1h10m Latent Space conversation, Cognition CTO Walden Yan and engineer Cole Murray walk through what they’re calling Devin’s “80% moment” — the point at which an autonomous coding agent can land production-grade PRs on real codebases at a rate that changes how teams work. Cognition is reporting a 7× increase in merged PRs for teams that adopt their background-agent workflow, and the conversation digs into why hand-held in-IDE coding is no longer the frontier....

Weekly Video Notes — a short article distilling one talk from the weekly digest. Source video and key frames embedded throughout. Cursor just published the 2026 edition of its Developer Habits report, drawing on aggregate data from millions of Cursor users. In this 16-minute walkthrough, a Cursor engineer reads the report live and annotates it with personal commentary from 10+ years building software. It’s the closest thing the industry has to a quantitative snapshot of how coding agents are reshaping day-to-day engineering work....

Weekly Video Notes — a short article distilling one talk from the weekly digest. Source video and key frames are embedded throughout. LangChain’s annual conference Interrupt 2026 opened with co-founder Harrison Chase laying out a thesis the company has been quietly building toward for two years: agents aren’t software, and you can’t ship them with a software lifecycle. What follows are the key ideas from the keynote, plus the half-dozen product launches LangChain announced to back the thesis....