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Research & Insights

What we're thinking about

Technical writing, architecture decisions, and honest assessments of AI tooling from engineers who build with it daily.

161 articles published
161 articlesLatest first
APR292026
AI News4

OpenAI Just Shipped Codex as a Claude Code Plugin — Here's What It Actually Means

OpenAI shipped an official Codex plugin for Claude Code, letting devs run both agents inside one terminal session. Truce, trojan horse, or just developers winning?

APR292026
Industry8 min read

The True Cost of Technical Debt in Legacy Systems

Tech debt is the silent tax on every AI agent feature you ship — slower onboarding, longer eval cycles, harder rollbacks. Here is how we quantify it before adding agent surface area.

APR282026
Opinion12

The AI Agent ROI Math Is Upside Down and Nobody Wants to Admit It

Companies are spending more on AI agents than the humans those agents replaced. The dirty secret is that almost nobody is measuring this honestly. Here is why the math is upside down — and what to do about it.

APR282026
Tools6

GitHub Copilot vs Claude Code in 2026: After Crunching the Numbers, Here's the Truth

Both vendors moved to usage-based billing the same week. After pricing real engineering workloads against both, here is when each one actually wins — and why most senior teams will end up paying for both.

APR282026
Engineering12

How to Add Idempotency Keys to Your API Without Breaking Existing Clients

AI agents retry. A lot. Without idempotency keys, every retry is a duplicate charge or duplicate side effect — here is how to add keys to a live API without breaking clients.

APR282026
AI & Engineering12 min read

The Vendor Lock-In Hidden in Your AI Prompts

An AI agent codebase holds hundreds of prompts. Claude prefers XML, GPT-4 prefers Markdown — switching providers means rewriting all of them. Format alone swings accuracy by 78 percentage points.

APR222026
Engineering14 min read

Product-Led Growth Engineering in the AI Era

PLG is evolving into ALG — Agentic-Led Growth. Cursor hit $500M ARR in under 24 months. Lovable hit $100M ARR in 8 months. Per-seat pricing is dying. Per-task and per-outcome models are replacing it. Engineering teams are being asked to build for metrics that did not exist 18 months ago.

APR152026
AI & Engineering15 min read

AI Agent Architecture: Production Patterns from the Field

Demos take a day. Production agents that survive six months take a team. This is Fordel's pillar guide to AI agent architecture: the orchestration, state-machine, tool-hardening, cost-control, and escalation patterns we use across every client deployment, with the failure modes each one solves.

APR152026
AI Strategy8 min

The Complacency Gap: What Switching AI Coding Tools Taught Me About Vigilance

Switching from Claude Code to Codex felt like cognitive load returning — slower, less comfortable, more effortful. Then I realized that load was not a cost. It was the work. A reflection on automation complacency, context decay, and what the right relationship with AI coding tools actually looks like.

APR152026
Explainer5

Prompt Injection Explained for People Who Don’t Write Code

Prompt injection is the AI version of social engineering: instead of hacking the system directly, an attacker tricks the model into following bad instructions. If your product uses AI to read, search, summarize, or take actions, this is a business risk, not just a technical one.

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