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.

Why 40 percent of AI agent projects get cancelled AI & Agents

Why 40% of AI Agent Projects Die

Eight patterns we keep seeing across AI agent engagements. What they look like, how they kill the project, and the cheap fix when caught early.

RAG versus fine-tuning versus long-context cost crossover in 2026 AI & Agents

RAG vs Fine-Tuning vs Long-Context 2026

The decision tree has changed. Where the new crossovers sit and a cost model in EUR for a 100MB corpus at 10k queries per month.

LLM API costs dropped 80 percent in 2026 AI & Agents

LLM API Costs 2026. Architecture Shift

Tokens are cheap now. Architecture tracks the price curve. Seven moves to make in 2026 now that context windows are huge and routing is the lever.

Ethereum to Solana migration cost teardown Web3 & Privacy

Ethereum to Solana Migration Cost

Honest teardown of an Ethereum to Solana migration. Account model, EVM to SVM tooling gap, indexer rebuild, wallet UX, token standards, redeploy cost.

Zero-knowledge proof use cases outside crypto Web3 & Privacy

Zero-Knowledge Outside Crypto

Six non-crypto ZK use cases. Privacy-preserving KYC, age verification, supply chain provenance, private credentials, confidential ML inference.

Account abstraction ERC-4337 in production Web3 & Privacy

Account Abstraction in Production

Six things ERC-4337 fixes versus six things it does not. Plus EIP-7702, bundler centralization risk, and paymaster economics.

Road to PMF Product & MVP

Road to Product Market Fit

Everyone talks about PMF. Almost nobody achieves it. The fastest way to guarantee you never will? Focus on the wrong things from day one.

Feature fabric Product & MVP

Escaping The Feature Trap

Most products die from too many features, not too few. Here's how to stop building everything and start shipping the one thing that actually matters.

Software a breathing organism header Delivery & QA

Software - a Breathing Organism

Software is never finished, yet most companies budget it like it is. Here's how to stop burning money and start building something users rave about.

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