Tag · 16 essays
Writing tagged "Performance".
AI agents make implementation faster, exposing bottlenecks in architecture, developer experience and review. I explore why engineering must plan the environment around the code.
This article explores an unexpected result from evaluating Contentstack’s MCP Profile Hub, where increasing a model’s reasoning effort made straightforward CMS agent tasks slower and less reliable. While enriching tool definitions with account-specific context clearly reduced tool calls, latency, and reasoning tokens, turning up the reasoning setting caused the model to distrust simple, correct tool responses and invent extra work. A control task listing global fields showed high-effort runs repeatedly ignoring a perfect API answer and exhausting their turn budget. The piece argues that reasoning effort must match the shape of the work, that bounded API operations often benefit from lower reasoning, and that agent evaluations should measure behaviour—calls, latency, traces, and early stopping—rather than abstract “intelligence” alone.
Claude Desktop currently launches duplicate local MCP stdio servers for a single configuration, causing two independent OAuth flows, extra browser tabs, and unnecessary resource usage. The bug is masked once credentials are cached, so it silently persists in production while still spawning two processes every time. This is not an mcp-remote or external service issue but a host-level lifecycle problem, likely caused by overlapping legacy and new MCP managers and poor observability for one of the processes. Workarounds like pre-authenticating with mcp-remote mitigate UX pain but do not fix the duplication. The article argues that open-source tools should not shoulder complex coordination logic just to survive a major desktop app’s sloppy process management.
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) was supposed to be a universal way to connect AI models to tools, but in practice it is fragmenting fast across vendors and implementations. Tool catalogs are extremely context-hungry, making naive MCP setups expensive, slow, and unreliable, especially with cheaper models. Developers are compensating with application-layer tricks like curated tool subsets, OAuth-based selection, Claude Skills style abstractions, and wrapping deterministic automation platforms such as Contentstack Automate. These patterns improve cost, reliability, and debuggability but highlight protocol-level gaps in context efficiency, determinism, and interoperability. The ecosystem is replaying past standards wars, and no clear winner is visible yet. The pragmatic move is to design flexible systems that can adapt when consolidation and better standards eventually emerge.
MCP servers shouldn't just expose endpoints, they should adapt to their environment, using project context to guide AI reasoning and execution.
Explore the significance of Software Development Toolkits (SDKs) in modern development, their advantages, and when you might want to skip them. From enhancing productivity to integrating complex functionalities seamlessly, the right SDK can accelerate your projects. But what about GraphQL-based systems or the flexibility of headless architectures? Dive into the pros and cons to make an informed decision.
In this blog post, I want to share how I transformed my website into the fastest site I've ever built. I'll walk you through the steps, my unconventional decisions, and the tools I used to achieve this feat.
Content management is as essential as it is complex, especially at scale. As brands grow, they often...
That’s a bold title, but it’s high time to change how we work with headless technology. I wrote about...
In recent years, headless technology, which boosts performance, developer experience, and...
Building outstanding user experiences takes, first and foremost, effective collaboration between...
If the internet were a country, it would be the world’s sixth biggest polluter. The...
Build it yourself or use Cloudinary Dynamic video streaming is a video delivery technique...
Nowadays, you’re hard pressed to find an application with all the functionalities you need for...
Even though you don’t see it, glue code is everywhere. Since the pendulum swung from monolithic...
To maintain an engaging relationship with your audience and increase conversions to your site, you...