OpenTelemetry for AI Applications and AI Agents: A Beginner's Guide

Introduces OpenTelemetry’s core components and observability signals, and explains how to use them with AI agents, RAG, and production systems.

July 16, 2026 · 20 min · 4176 words · Andy SI
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What Did Tencent AI Leader Shunyu Yao Discuss in This Podcast?

Drawing on Latent Space’s interview with Shunyu Yao, this article reviews ReAct, Reflexion, Tree of Thoughts, memory, benchmarks, ACI, and Agent UX, and summarizes the importance of tools, environments, evaluation, and interface design when putting AI agents into practice.

May 24, 2026 · 15 min · 2983 words · Andy SI
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What AI Engineers Should Learn in 2026

Starting from the trend of platforms absorbing basic RAG pipelines, this article examines the high-premium skills AI application engineers should prioritize in 2026: evaluation and observability, data governance and access control, and deep engineering capabilities for agentic workflows.

May 3, 2026 · 18 min · 3701 words · Andy SI
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When an LLM's Inner State and Its Words Diverge: A Master Key to Understanding LLM Behavior

Using the bandwidth gap between hidden states and tokens, this article offers one explanation for LLM engineering phenomena such as Chain of Thought, prompt length, few-shot learning, personality drift, and hallucinations.

May 2, 2026 · 16 min · 3265 words · Andy SI
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The Full Landscape of LLM Training: What Every AI Application Engineer Should Understand

A systematic tour of the entire LLM training pipeline—from data pipelines, scaling laws, system constraints, synthetic data, distillation, post-training, and evaluation systems to agent training—and how these mechanisms affect model selection, evaluation, and harness design for AI application engineers.

April 4, 2026 · 32 min · 6654 words · Andy SI
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The Agentic Evolution of LLMs: From Answering Questions to Working Autonomously

Begin with a Comparison You ask ChatGPT, “What is a KV cache?” The model answers, and the conversation ends. You tell Codex CLI, “Add a user-authentication module to this project, including tests.” The agent begins working autonomously: read the project structure → understand the existing code → plan the implementation → write authentication logic → write tests → run tests → observe a failure → fix it → get the tests passing → open a pull request. The process may span dozens of steps without requiring your intervention. The underlying LLM may be the same, but the behavior is entirely different. The first is the traditional use of an LLM. The second is an agentic use. This article explains the nature of that transition. It is more than a stronger model. It is a fundamental shift in the way the model is used, and that shift reshapes the entire engineering system around it. ...

March 28, 2026 · 9 min · 1850 words · Andy SI
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Entropy in LLMs: A Unifying Language from Training to Inference and Products

This article connects cross-entropy, perplexity, temperature, conditional entropy, hallucination detection, and prompt constraints into one line of reasoning, showing how entropy provides a unified language for understanding LLM training, inference, and product design. It also explains entropy’s practical value in RAG and engineering governance.

March 27, 2026 · 6 min · 1263 words · Andy SI
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Agent = Model + Harness

LangChain’s breakdown of the agent harness connects context engineering, memory, MCP, and the agent loop into one coherent map.

March 18, 2026 · 6 min · 1167 words · Andy SI
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The Complete Best-Practices Guide to Prompt Engineering

A long-form Prompt Engineering guide for AI application engineers, covering foundational principles, context design, task chains, injection defenses, agent prompt design, and evaluation-driven development.

March 11, 2026 · 19 min · 4045 words · Andy SI
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Apple M5 vs. M4: A Practical Comparison for AI Engineers

A practical breakdown for AI engineers of what the M5’s changes over the M4—from CPU, cache, and memory bandwidth to Neural Accelerators—mean for local LLM and diffusion inference.

March 6, 2026 · 13 min · 2757 words · Andy SI
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