Field Notes
ARTICLES: 4 UPDATED: 31 JULY 2026

Engineering
Notes, Mostly

Field guides on models, coding agents, and the economics underneath, from daily work at the frontier of agentic engineering. Plus opinions on France, Europe, and the world, offered with the full authority of a student envisioning the future, which is to say none.

Index

A plain-language explainer of what AI actually is and why its plumbing is a European problem, written for a lawyer, a field guide to the models, coding agents, and economics of building with AI in July 2026, a survey of the tooling that keeps agentic systems fast and cheap at scale, and a 21-page deck that turns the coding-agent half of all that into a first week you can hand a colleague.

Essay · 23 July 2026 · ~20 min read

AI Explained to My Lawyer Mom

What these machines actually are, how they fail, where your files go the moment you use one, and why Europe keeps writing rules for an industry it doesn't own. A plain-language explainer for a non-technical reader who deserves better than the hype.

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Field guide · 16 July 2026 · ~35 min read

AI for Software Engineers: The July 2026 Field Guide

Everything a good coder needs to know about the AI landscape right now: models, coding agents, the Python stack, the economics, and the mental models that make it all click. With a curated syllabus of the canonical reading.

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Survey · 22 July 2026

The Engineering Playbook: Cheap-at-Scale Agentic Engineering

A survey of the tools, infrastructure, and patterns for building agentic systems that stay fast, correct, and radically cheap, with the trade-offs stated plainly so you can choose for yourself.

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Deck · 31 July 2026 · 21 pages, PDF

Claude Code: The Engineer's Guide

Everything an engineer needs to go from a first session to worktrees, hooks, and headless CI, with the models and prices as they stood on 26 July 2026 and a seven-day ramp that ends in a workflow rather than a habit of asking a chatbot for code.

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