Older posts.
Stablecoins in 2026: $300B in Supply, 1% Real Payments, and Rails Being Rebuilt for Agents
GENIUS Act rules are still proposals, Visa settles $7B a year in USDC, Stripe launched its own chain, and x402 has 165 million transactions worth about $50 million. An infrastructure engineer separates the settlement layer that is real from the agent-payments layer that is mostly still a demo.
16 minSep 7, 2026Quantum Hardware in 2026: Below Threshold, Not Yet Useful, and the Estimates That Fell 200x
Google is below the surface-code threshold, Quantinuum is public, IBM claims advantage three times in one day, and the qubit count needed to break RSA-2048 dropped from 20 million to under 100,000 on paper. What a systems engineer should take from all of it, with a runnable error-correction simulation.
15 minSep 7, 2026No-Code Didn't Die. It Sold for 2.7x ARR While Its Replacement Raised at 27x
Airtable sold to Bending Spoons for about a quarter of its 2021 valuation on $480M of growing revenue. Lovable raised at $13.3B on $500M. Flowise archived itself and said why. What the 2026 numbers say about visual builders, prompt-to-app tools and agentic automation, and where every generated app still breaks.
13 minSep 7, 2026LLM Inference in 2026: Prefill Is a Different Machine Now, and the KV Cache Has a Disk Tier
vLLM 0.28, SGLang on 400,000 GPUs, NVIDIA Dynamo 1.0 and llm-d in the CNCF all converged on the same architecture: split prefill from decode, route on cached prefixes, page the KV cache to CPU and SSD, and run MoE experts wide across a rack. What changed this year, with the papers, the flags, and the prices.
15 minSep 7, 2026Who Is This Agent? Non-Human Identity in 2026, From the RFCs to the Breaches
Machines outnumber humans 109 to 1 in the enterprise directory, the OAuth working group has 70 drafts in flight, MCP just deprecated dynamic registration, and an agent with an over-scoped token deleted a production database in nine seconds. What actually standardised this year, what shipped, and the delegation chain I would build.
16 minSep 6, 2026Seats Are Dying. What the 2026 SaaS Repricing Looks Like From the Compute Layer
A one-day 18% drop in Thomson Reuters, $1.50 per resolution at Zendesk, $15 per human at Microsoft, and a vibe-coding company at $500M run-rate with 200 people. The unit of software changed this year. Here is what it did to infrastructure.
13 minSep 6, 2026Post-Quantum Migration in 2026: What's Done, What's Stuck, and What to Do This Quarter
Two-thirds of browser traffic to Cloudflare is already post-quantum. Your SSH is too. Your certificates are not, and won't be until 2027. A field guide for infrastructure engineers, with verified commands and hard deadlines.
13 minSep 6, 2026The Worms Learned to Use Your AI Agent: A Year of npm Supply-Chain Attacks
From s1ngularity invoking Claude Code to hunt for wallets, to Shai-Hulud self-publishing across 500 packages, to IronWorm stealing AI API keys — the twelve months that changed how I install software.
13 minSep 6, 2026Neuromorphic Computing in 2026: Real at Microwatts, Not for LLMs
Intel archived Lava and went quiet. BrainChip shipped production silicon. Sandia runs a billion neurons. An infrastructure engineer's honest read of where spiking hardware actually wins, with benchmark numbers and a runnable SNN.
12 minSep 6, 2026MCP Security in 2026: The Protocol Got Hardened. The Ecosystem Didn't.
A year of MCP CVEs, a rewritten spec, an NSA guidance sheet and an OWASP Top 10 — what actually changed, what didn't, and the six controls I'd insist on before an MCP server touches production.
12 minSep 3, 2026Top AI Agent Sandbox Providers: An Engineer's 2026 Roundup
A working engineer's roundup of the top AI agent sandbox providers: isolation, hosting, persistence and pricing compared — including the one I built myself.
10 minSep 3, 2026AI Agent Sandboxes: What They Are and How to Choose One
What an AI agent sandbox is at the systems level, the four properties that decide one, and how 15 platforms compare — from an engineer who built one of them.
10 minSep 3, 2026AI Agent Sandbox Runtime: The Six Options and Who Uses Them
Firecracker, gVisor, Kata, containers, V8 isolates and libkrun compared — how each isolates, what it costs in memory, and which sandbox vendors run it.
10 minSep 3, 2026AI Agent Cloud: What the Term Means and Who Actually Has One
An AI agent cloud needs more than a sandbox: state, hosting, triggers, audit. I map 15 platforms against that stack and show where each one stops short.
10 minSep 2, 2026It's 2 AM. Do You Know What Your AI Agent Is Doing?
I run the microVMs that other people's AI agents execute in. At 2 AM almost all of them are idle — and the things burning money are the robots watching them.
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