FROM THE TRENCHES Issue №165

Opinions, Not Press Releases

Browse a curated front page, then move through focused topic and cluster hubs without losing older work to chronology.

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06
Focused clusters
12
Blog posts
165

Latest articles

Nine articles per page, ordered by publication date.

Open-weight LLM comparison 2026: DeepSeek vs Qwen vs Kimi vs GLM vs Llama AI & Agents

Best Open-Weight LLMs 2026: DeepSeek vs Qwen vs Kimi vs GLM vs Llama

DeepSeek V4, Qwen3.6, Kimi K3, GLM-5.2 and Llama 4 compared on architecture, context, license, self-hosting footprint and the workloads each family fits.

An honest guide to AI consulting in Austria 2026 Business & Regulation

AI Consulting in Austria 2026: An Honest Guide for SMEs

What AI consulting really covers, what it costs in 2026, which use cases pay off, what the EU AI Act asks today, and how funding works. An engineering view, not a sales pitch.

Why context, not intelligence, was the real bottleneck in software AI & Agents

The Bottleneck Was Never Intelligence. It Was Context.

Rakuten ran a coding agent for seven hours on vLLM at 99.9% accuracy. The real lesson is not the hours. It is that context, not intelligence, was the bottleneck, and that directing agents became the new deep work.

ChatGPT Enterprise, Microsoft 365 Copilot and a custom RAG build compared for a DACH company AI & Agents

ChatGPT Enterprise vs Copilot vs Custom RAG

Which should a DACH company buy? A neutral procurement guide: where your data lives, what each costs, and the decision rules. None of them is GDPR compliant on its own.

Where your AI data is stored and processed across EU residency options Business & Regulation

EU Data Residency for AI APIs in 2026: Provider Guide

Compare EU storage and inference guarantees across OpenAI, Azure, Mistral, AWS and self-hosting. Current endpoints, transfer caveats and a procurement checklist.

Security, IP and investor-readiness due diligence for apps built with Lovable, Bolt and Replit Delivery & QA

Lovable, Bolt, and Replit App Due Diligence

Before you raise or sell on a vibe-coded app, three questions decide whether it survives diligence: is it safe, do you own it, can anyone maintain it? The security, IP, and investor checklist.

The four AI funding routes in Austria for 2026 Business & Regulation

AI Funding in Austria 2026: aws, FFG, Premium, KMU.DIGITAL

The four AI funding routes in Austria for 2026, honestly assessed: aws for adoption, FFG for R&D, the 14% research premium, and KMU.DIGITAL. Plus the catch nobody mentions: open calls and budget.

How to roll out AI internally in 2026 without shelfware Leadership & Teams

How to Roll Out AI Internally in 2026

Most internal AI rollouts stall as shelfware. The order we apply: educate the team, map the real process, settle cost and compliance, ship one workflow to production, then hand it over so your team owns it.

MCP, RAG, Agent Skills and Custom GPTs compared as layers of one AI system AI & Agents

MCP vs RAG vs Agent Skills vs Custom GPTs

Not four answers to one question, but four layers: RAG for knowledge, MCP for connectivity, Skills for procedure, Custom GPTs as a packaged surface. A decision tree, and why you usually compose them.

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