MCP's Stateless Spec Fixes Session Hijacking — and Hands You Three New Attack Surfaces
The 2026-07-28 revision closes the holes the protocol used to own. The same three headline features quietly relocate the security burden onto server code that mostly doesn't exist yet.
5 min
The Mastra npm Attack: AI Agent Frameworks Are the New Supply-Chain Target
A North Korean crew republished 140+ Mastra packages in 88 minutes with a poisoned dependency. The scary part isn't the payload — it's that the whole attack ran before any of your agent's guardrails woke up.
5 min
LLM Cascade vs Router: Escalate to a Bigger Model, or Route Around It?
A router picks a model before it sees the answer; a cascade tries the cheap one first and escalates only if a judge says so — and that judge, not the models, decides whether you actually save.
6 min
Interleaved Thinking: When Should an AI Agent Reason Between Tool Calls?
The point of thinking between tool calls isn't a smarter first plan — a model can plan up front without it. The point is that the model can notice a tool returned something wrong and re-plan on the spot, instead of barreling ahead.
4 min
How to Enforce a Token Budget on an AI Agent (Not Just Measure It)
Most 'agent budgets' are alerts wearing a brake's uniform: they tell you after the money is gone. Real enforcement is a prediction problem, because the cost of the next step is a bound you can only ever estimate — never a number you can look up.
5 min
How MCP Servers Actually Ship: The Registry Is a Phone Book, OCI Is the Supply Chain
The official MCP registry deliberately refuses to host code — so the hard part, trust, lands wherever the artifact lives. Docker's answer is to make that place an OCI image.
4 min
Google Open-Sourced an Agent Memory System With No Vector Database. Read the Design.
A Google PM's 'Always On Memory Agent' stores everything in SQLite and consolidates it with an LLM every 30 minutes. The 30-minute number tells you exactly what it's for — and what it isn't.
5 min
Does Structured Output Hurt LLM Accuracy? The Format Tax, Measured
Forcing JSON can cost a reasoning model 10–15% — but the tax is paid during thinking, not from structure itself. The fix is where you put the reasoning, not whether you constrain.
4 min
Claude Sonnet 5 vs Opus 4.8 for Agents: The Cheaper Model and the Tokenizer Catch
Sonnet 5 lands at 40% below Opus and beats it on terminal work — but a new tokenizer quietly inflates every token count by ~30%, so the rate card is not the price. Do the cost math in your own units.
5 min
What Anthropic's 'Dreaming' Does to Agent Memory — and Why a Bad Dream Doesn't Wash Out
Claude's new consolidation loop replays an agent's day and writes down what it learned. The same mechanism that lifted one customer's task completion ~6x is the one that makes a poisoned lesson permanent.
6 min
Batch API vs Real-Time Inference: The 50% Discount Isn't Why You Should Use It
Every provider now sells the same deal — hand over your requests, wait up to 24 hours, pay half. The savings are real, but the reason to reach for batch is the thing nobody puts on the pricing page.
4 min
AWS Will Now Let You Charge AI Agents Per Request: How x402 Metering at the CDN Edge Works
AWS WAF Bot Control can now return an HTTP 402 with a machine-readable price and settle USDC before the request ever reaches your origin. The real shift isn't crypto — it's that a web page finally has an enforceable price for a machine.
4 min
Agent Skills Are an Open Standard: What Portability Buys — and What It Can't Enforce
A Skill is a folder with a SKILL.md and an Apache-2.0 license — no server, no transport, no auth. That's why another runtime can adopt it in an afternoon, and why a Skill can't revoke, throttle, or contain anything.
4 min
Agent Handoffs in LangGraph, OpenAI Agents SDK, and Google ADK: What Actually Transfers With Control
Every multi-agent framework now has a handoff primitive, and they all look the same in the demo. The difference that bites you in production is what rides along when one agent passes the baton to the next.
5 min
Tool Choice: auto vs required vs Forcing One Tool
tool_choice looks like a switch for making a model use tools. It's really the decision of whether a turn is allowed to end the conversation — and leaving 'required' on traps the agent loop with no way out.
5 min
TeleMem vs Mem0: When a Drop-In Memory Layer Is Really a Different Bet
TeleMem ships as a one-line replacement for Mem0 — import telemem as mem0 — and claims a 16-point accuracy edge. Read where that number comes from and you learn exactly which agent it's for.
4 min
Right to Be Forgotten in RAG: How to Actually Delete a User From a Vector Database
The DELETE call is the easy five percent. A user's data has already fanned out into the index, the chunk store, the cache, your trace logs, and maybe a fine-tune — and in most vector engines the delete is a tombstone the graph keeps walking until compaction.
6 min
When Prompt Injection Becomes Remote Code Execution: Why Agent Command Allowlists Keep Failing
Three critical 2026 CVEs — in ModelScope's MS-Agent, Microsoft's Semantic Kernel, and Cursor — share one root cause. The agent filtered the command it was about to run. It never controlled the ground that command would run on.
5 min
MCP Server Cards: How an Agent Will Vet a Server Before It Connects
A new .well-known discovery file lets clients read an MCP server's identity, transport, and auth requirements without a handshake — and it pointedly refuses to list the tools.
5 min
The Confused Deputy Problem in MCP: Why Agent Auth Keeps Failing the Same Way
A 1988 access-control bug is the shape of 2026's worst MCP breaches. Understanding the confused deputy tells you why 'just add OAuth' doesn't fix your agent — and what the spec actually changed.
5 min
MCP-Bench vs MCPToolBench++ vs MCPAgentBench: How to Benchmark an Agent's MCP Tool Use
Function-calling leaderboards test a model against a handful of curated tools. A real MCP host hands it thousands — and that is a different benchmark, with a different failure mode.
4 min
How to Attribute LLM Costs Per Agent, Tenant, and Feature
The invoice arrives and no one can say which customer spent the money. Cost attribution isn't a report you run later — it's a schema decision you make at request time, and for agents the gateway total lies about where the spend went.
4 min
Hyperlight vs Firecracker: The Micro-VM That Deleted the Guest Kernel to Sandbox Agent Code
Firecracker gives each agent a whole Linux to boot — 125 ms of it. Hyperlight keeps the hardware wall and throws away the OS behind it, and that deletion is what makes per-tool-call isolation affordable.
5 min
How Vulnerable Are MCP Servers? A Scan of 39,884 Repos Found 106 Zero-Days
A new automated auditor didn't just flag risky code in Model Context Protocol servers — it wrote the prompts to prove the holes were real. 67 already carry CVE IDs, and almost none are AI-specific.
4 min
How to Tune HNSW: The Three Knobs Behind Vector Search Recall
M, ef_construction, and ef_search decide whether your vector search is fast, accurate, or neither. Only one of them can be changed after you build the index — and it's the one most teams never touch.
5 min
How to Summarize a Document That Doesn't Fit in the Context Window: Map-Reduce vs Refine vs Not at All
Map-reduce's 'reduce' step quietly re-creates the exact overflow you were escaping. Refine can't parallelize. And in 2026 the fastest-improving option is often to stop summarizing and put the whole document in a million-token window — if you can pay the middle.
5 min
How to Handle a Truncated LLM Response: finish_reason, max_tokens, and the Reasoning-Token Trap
A cut-off completion isn't an error your code catches — it's a 200 OK whose only tell is a stop-reason field most callers never read. And on reasoning models, the fix everyone reaches for can hand you an empty response.
5 min
How to Evaluate an AI Coding Agent
Public leaderboards answer 'which model is smartest,' not 'will it fix my bugs' — the only test that predicts your outcome is a private eval built from your own repo.
7 min
How to Deploy a Long-Running AI Agent Without Losing In-Flight Work
A web server drains its in-flight requests in 30 seconds and restarts. An agent's in-flight request is a multi-hour, side-effecting loop — so graceful shutdown stops being a deploy setting and becomes an architecture decision you had to make weeks earlier.
5 min
How AI Agents Decide What to Forget: Memory Consolidation in Mem0, Zep, and the Memory Tool
Every serious agent-memory system is really a forgetting system. The hard part was never storing what the agent learns — it's pruning the contradictions and stale facts that quietly poison retrieval.
5 min