The AI beat
AI engineering
Building agents and LLM systems, and what I got wrong along the way.
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MCP or a direct API? Wiring tools into agents
The same tool built twice, and a rule of thumb for choosing between a direct tool call and an MCP server.
Intermediate · 10 min
When to abandon the low-code path
Why I rebuilt my procurement agent from scratch in week three of a fifteen-week internship.
What tool grounding fixed, and what it missed
I required the agent's factual claims about teams, players, games, and predictions to come from database-backed tools. That stopped it inventing statistics. It did not make the answers true.
Notes from building with Claude Code
Patterns that have held up since November 2025.