Vendor stacks, protocols, certification paths, and field notes from delivery.
Model registries were built to version a trained artefact you own. An LLM application's behaviour comes from a hosted snapshot that retires on someone else's calendar, plus prompts, an index and tools you change weekly. The relea…
In 2021 a benchmark of 18 retrieval datasets found that a scoring function from 1994 still beat most neural retrievers outside their training domain. BM25 is not a heuristic that got lucky. It is a deliberate approximation of a p…
A comprehensive, interactive study guide covering every domain of the Claude Certified Architect - Foundations (CCAF) exam. Master agentic architecture, tool design, Claude Code configuration, prompt engineering, and context mana…
Every major enterprise vendor now sells a way to build AI agents, and they are not competing on the same axis. The real choice is not which product is best. It is how much control you are willing to trade for how much convenience.
At Microsoft, roughly one third of tested ideas move the metric in the intended direction. That number is only meaningful if the tests are trustworthy, and the four failure modes that destroy trustworthiness all produce a clean, …
The dream of automating office work is older than the personal computer. Tracing the line from VisiCalc through RPA to LLM agents reveals a recurring lesson: the tools that record steps break, and the tools that pursue goals are …
Every joint-embedding method has the same trivial solution available to it: map every input to the same vector. The history of self-supervised learning is the history of preventing that, and the methods that look most different f…
LoRA is usually explained as a budget approximation of full fine-tuning: same destination, less memory. Two lines of evidence say that framing is wrong. LoRA learns less, forgets less, and reaches a structurally different solutio…
Microsoft has renamed its AI development platform three times in three years, from Azure AI Studio to Azure AI Foundry to Microsoft Foundry. Behind the branding churn is a genuinely ambitious consolidation: 1,900+ models, a manag…
Before MCP, connecting five agents to twenty tools meant writing a hundred bespoke adapters. A protocol turns that multiplication into an addition, and the math is the whole story.
An LLM-written pseudo-document lifts BM25 by 15 nDCG@10 points on TREC DL 2019, and turns a 16 ms search into one that waits over two seconds for the model. Query understanding decides what the engine searches for before ranking …
Move a document from rank 5 to rank 1 and its click-through rate jumps without its relevance changing at all. Train on those clicks and the model learns position, which the previous ranker chose, which means it learns to imitate …