Byte-Sized Design

🚪 Uber Put 5,000 Tools in Front of Its Agents. Every One Ships Switched Off.

800+ MCP servers behind one gateway, drafted by a crawler and approved by humans

14 hrs ago • Byte-Sized Design

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September 2026

🚦 Spotify Doubled Its Engineering Output. The Bottleneck Just Moved.

Spotify's merged changes doubled with AI and code quality held. Review, testing, and ops strained instead. A five-part scorecard for measuring AI's real…

Sep 24 • Byte-Sized Design

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🧱 Your Multi-Agent Architecture Is a 2016 Microservices Diagram With the Boxes Renamed

The parts that still work, the three places it breaks, and one heuristic for right now

Sep 12 • Byte-Sized Design

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🔌 Stripe's Proxy Was Opening Hundreds Of Thousands Of Connections

A Go proxy, one connection per host, and 3,000 days of latency saved every day

Sep 8 • Byte-Sized Design

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August 2026

How AssemblyAI Collapsed Four Vendors Into A single API Key

From recorded phone call to redacted, summarized record, behind one key. The architecture deletes three vendor seams.

Aug 28 • Byte-Sized Design

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GitHub's 8-Hour Outage Was Mostly Retries

One sidecar hit its ceiling. The clients did the other seven hours.

Aug 19 • Byte-Sized Design

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Linear Skipped the Agent Frameworks and Wrote Their Own Harness

Shallow tools, just-in-time skills, and a defensible case for a custom harness

Aug 10 • Byte-Sized Design

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How AI Agents Actually Talk to Each Other

And why "MCP vs A2A" is a fight that doesn't exist

Aug 6 • Byte-Sized Design

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July 2026

Engineers Are Still Saying No For A Reason That Stopped Being True

Saying no used to be free. GitHub is noticing that for one class of change, the debate now costs more than just building the thing.

Jul 20 • Byte-Sized Design

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Your Homegrown System Was Right in 2018. It's a Liability Now.

Millions of batch jobs, migrated in 4 weeks, and nobody noticed

Jul 13 • Byte-Sized Design

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OpenAI's bug that hid inside a 100-picosecond window

How OpenAI stopped debugging like a doctor and started thinking like an epidemiologist and caught a race condition in the process.

Jul 6 • Byte-Sized Design

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June 2026

The Bug That Hid From Every Tool Cloudflare Had

Cloudflare found a race condition buried in one of Rust's most-deployed libraries, and the fix was four lines

Jun 30 • Byte-Sized Design

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