Notes from the build.
Notes from building MCP servers, API integrations, ingestion pipelines, and RAG systems. Written by the engineers who ship them, not a content team.
MCP and agents
RAG or MCP: which one does your use case actually need
Two teams describe the same project and mean opposite architectures. One question sorts it: would a person answer this by opening a document, or by opening a system? Documents mean retrieval. Systems mean tools. Here is how we decide, plus the third option that beats both more often than anyone admits.
Read post · 9 min read July 2026 · MCP Tool design Engineering
How to design MCP tools your agent will not misuse
Agents do not call the wrong tool because they are careless. They call it because the tool surface is ambiguous. Here are the design rules we apply to every MCP server we build: naming, required parameters, typed errors, server-side authorization, idempotency keys, and how to score selection accuracy before it reaches production.
Read post · 9 min read
Integrations
Build integrations in house, buy a platform, or outsource: an honest decision framework
Three ways to resource integration work, what each really costs in money and attention, why the build estimate is usually a third of the true number, and the cases where hiring an outside team is the wrong call.
Read post · 8 min read July 2026 · Idempotency Reliability Data pipelines
Why your integration creates duplicates, and the patterns that stop it
A retry writes the same record twice and nothing alerts. The duplicate surfaces weeks later during reconciliation. Here are the patterns that make repeated writes safe: derived external ids, idempotency keys, cursors instead of timestamp watermarks, and a dead-letter queue an operations person can clear.
Read post · 9 min read July 2026 · Integrations Estimation Cost
What an integration actually costs, broken down
Why the happy path is about a quarter of the work, where the rest of the days go, which target systems are expensive and why, and what maintenance really costs per month. In engineering-days, not currency.
Read post · 8 min read
Pipelines and data
Arabic RAG that works: embeddings, chunking, and reranking for real Arabic documents
Most retrieval stacks were tuned on English and quietly underperform on Arabic. Here is how an engineer builds an Arabic document assistant that actually retrieves: normalization, the right embeddings, sentence-aware chunking, reranking, and honest evaluation.
Read post · 9 min read June 2026 · Deployment Docker Guide
Deploying agents on a server, the simple way
Your agent works on your laptop. Now it needs to run on a server, all day, and survive restarts. One tool matters most: Docker. This guide explains it in plain words and ships a full agent stack with one command.
Read post · 8 min read June 2026 · Vector databases Search Deep dive
Search that finds what you meant: vector databases, explained properly
You searched the archive for 'termination clause' and got nothing, because the contract says 'cancellation terms'. Keyword search matches letters, not meaning. Vector databases fix this, and this post explains exactly how, down to the index.
Read post · 10 min read June 2026 · Databases Storage Guide
Your data is in the wrong place: a plain guide to storage and databases
Contracts in email attachments, customer records in a spreadsheet that four people edit, scans in a folder called 'final-FINAL'. The problem is not messiness; it is that each kind of data needs a different home. Here is the map.
Read post · 8 min read May 2026 · OCR Arabic On-prem
Why Arabic OCR still fails, and how we fixed it
Ligatures, diacritics, and mixed-direction documents break almost every off-the-shelf engine. The three changes that took us from 71% to 99.2% field-level accuracy on real Gulf documents.
Read post · 6 min read April 2026 · Cost Strategy
The real cost of cloud AI APIs at scale
Per-token pricing looks cheap in a demo and expensive in production. A clear look at where cloud AI costs explode at scale, and when owning your inference starts to pay off.
Read post · 5 min read
Agents in production
The deadly security mistakes when deploying AI agents
An agent is a model with hands. Give it tools and credentials carelessly and a single poisoned email can move money, leak records, or rewrite its own instructions. The seven mistakes that cause real incidents, and the fix for each.
Read post · 9 min read June 2026 · Agentic workflows Tools Guide
How to build an agentic workflow that runs on its own
An agent is a model with tools, memory, and a goal. This guide explains the idea in plain words, then matches you to the right tool: n8n if you do not code, CrewAI if you want Python fast, LangGraph if you need full control.
Read post · 9 min read June 2026 · MCP APIs Guide
Your AI can think but cannot act: APIs, MCP, and how to fix it
The assistant writes a perfect answer about your inventory, but it cannot actually open your inventory. The missing piece is a connection layer: APIs, and now MCP, the standard that connects AI to your systems once instead of integration by integration.
Read post · 8 min read June 2026 · Deployment Strategy
Why most AI pilots never reach production
Most enterprise AI never leaves the pilot. The gap is rarely the model. It is data access, approvals, and trust. Here is what actually blocks production, and how to clear it.
Read post · 5 min read May 2026 · Agents Fundamentals
Agentic workflows, explained for regulated enterprises
An AI agent is not a chatbot. It reads, decides, and acts across your systems, within limits you set. What agentic workflows are, and what makes them safe enough for a bank.
Read post · 5 min read May 2026 · Agents Controls
Letting agents act without losing control
Autonomy is not all-or-nothing. The right design lets an agent do the work and a human own the decision. How approval gates, not blind trust, make agents deployable in regulated settings.
Read post · 5 min read April 2026 · Audit Compliance
An audit trail your regulator will accept for AI
For regulated AI, it works is not enough. You must prove what it did and why. A practical guide to building an audit trail an auditor will actually accept.
Read post · 5 min read April 2026 · ERP Integration
Connecting agents to SAP and Oracle behind the firewall
An agent is only useful if it can touch your real systems. How we wire agents into on-prem ERP like SAP, Oracle, and Dynamics without opening a hole to the public cloud.
Read post · 6 min read