Notes, mostly on data & agents.
Notes on data engineering, distributed systems, Rust, and — lately — AI agents. I've been writing here since 2015; some posts are reference docs I keep coming back to, others are thinking out loud.
Grok Bot
I am on SuperGrok Heavy because of Grok Bot and I am super impressed. Wow, from me, at first. The harness is surprisingly good. The UI/UX is surprisingly good.
Quick Thoughts
How do I trust my agents more
People keep asking how to trust agents more. Most still review every line. That is the wrong lever. This workshop recap gets it: ban the patterns agents are bad at, put verification in front, then let them merge. CI, tests, skills, cloud agents that open and ship PRs. You stop cooking every dish. You run the kitchen. That is how I trust Grok Bot / duyetbot / Herdr more than line-by-line review. Guardrails beat watching. I wrote the longer version at Grok Bot. Same pipeline: Verification → skills → cloud agents → automerged PRs. Hire another reviewer, or spend the tokens on checks that actually catch what agents mess up.
AI tools I use — Aug 2026
I keep changing things to discover more tools every day … Some notes on my latest update: I'm off the Claude Max 20x subscription now. Still think Claude Code works best with their own models — using it with another model isn't what it used to be. See the new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models. Fable is really good; Opus 5 leaves me cold. Tried Codex. Left a few times. The app still doesn't work for me. I just don't like it — hard to control things. Herdr + Grok Build CLI is my main stack now. SuperGrok Heavy is $300 and that's a hard price to swallow, but the terminal quality is first-class. Herdr is replacing tmux and will become much better for AI, I think, so far. The things I love about Herdr: persistent state, works across machines, can control the agent itself, cool worktree story. Grok Bot still feels like the best design I can imagine for a good agent and assistant, and I wrote it up at blog.duyet.net/2026/08/grok-bot. It's just simple and does really well. They move fast and fix a lot; it works effectively, not aspirationally. No FOMO — you should try it if you can. You can also grab some templatebot.lol here. anyrouter.dev/cli — I keep trying to make this mainstream, and it's not good enough honestly. The upstream providers are still unstable, and finding good sources is the actual bottleneck.
System prompt vs tool schema
Should the system prompt describe each tool? No. The model already gets tools as their own field: name, description, JSON schema. Reprinting that list in the system prompt just costs tokens and goes stale. Use the split: Tool description — what it does, how to call it, when this tool applies or must not. System prompt — who wins, what order, what never happens. Policy, not a catalog. Code / middleware — hard stops the model will skip if you only write them in prose. If a tool never appears in the prompt and still gets called, that is working as designed.
Cloudflare Agents Week so far
Cloudflare CI/CD — A TypeScript-native CI/CD system built on Workflows. Define pipelines in code instead of YAML: each CI step maps to a Workflow step with built-in retries, state persistence, and parallel execution via Promise.all(). Includes dependency caching through sandbox snapshots in R2, and self-healing builds powered by Think agents on Workers AI that detect failures and push fixes automatically. Trigger pipelines directly on artifact push events — no manual queue wiring required. Cloudflare Wallet — cloudflare.pay — Cloudflare's payments and billing surface. Keep an eye on the blog for more details as it lands. Agent Tracing — Out-of-the-box debugging for AI agent sessions. Session replay lets you inspect full conversation context: system instructions, model thinking, tool calls, and responses. Trace waterfall view shows time allocation across model calls, tool execution, and infrastructure calls. Supports Think, Flue, and AI SDK harnesses natively, with OpenTelemetry export to any OTLP-compatible backend. Enable in wrangler.jsonc with observability.traces.enabled: true. Pricing starts October 1, 2026: 200k events/day free, then 20M included/month on Paid at $0.60/M additional. Currently free while in beta. (blog.cloudflare.com/agents-on-cloudflare) @cloudflare/computer — Early-preview agent runtime that dynamically orchestrates between fast isolates and full Linux containers on a shared virtual filesystem. Each agent gets a dedicated filespace while the platform picks the right execution environment per task. FUSE mount + SQLite-backed storage + agent hibernation when idle. Built on just-bash for isolates, npm-capable for containers. Open-source with tutorials at github.com/cloudflare/computer. (blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-computer) Otel traces in wrangler dev — OpenTelemetry tracing now ships inside local development. Agents get the same observability they have in production, built directly into Wrangler and the Cloudflare Vite plugin — no external collector setup needed to iterate locally. Agent Development Lifecycle (ADLC) — Cloudflare is replacing the traditional SDLC with an Agent Development Lifecycle built for autonomous software factories where agents own the full dev loop. Cloudflare identifies seven requirements: programmatic, horizontally scalable, reproducible, real-time/push-based, atomic changes, permissioned access, and self-improving. Building a Software Factory — Cloudflare's own internal implementation runs on the same primitives it ships to customers: Artifacts for versioned code storage, Workflows for durable orchestration, Sandboxes for isolated execution, Workers AI for agent intelligence, and Dynamic Workflows for customer-defined jobs alongside platform-managed pipelines. Feature flagging via Flagship gives every change its own flag; gradual deployments roll out code to a percentage of traffic over time. Enforcing AI Standards — Cloudflare now enforces AI coding standards across all internal repositories automatically: lint, typecheck, build, and AI-specific checks gate every PR. The same system powers self-healing CI that detects failures, diagnoses root cause, and pushes a fix commit without human intervention. Cloudflare MCP Server — Powered by Code Mode and Dynamic Workers, giving agents programmatic access to the entire Cloudflare API: buy domains, create accounts, manage DNS, query D1, upload to R2 — anything the API can do, an agent can do. Local dev for everything — Remote bindings let you run agents locally against real production resources without deploying. The local dev environment now mirrors production runtime across DOs, Workflows, Queues, and Containers, so what works locally works in production.