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Said Yaka

Topic

AI Engineering

8 essays

  1. Context Windows Are Not Memory

    A long context window feels like memory, but it is just a working set. Real memory needs selection, persistence, and a plan for what to forget.

  2. RAG Evaluations That Actually Catch Regressions

    A practical framework for building retrieval and answer-quality evaluations that catch real regressions instead of producing vanity metrics.

  3. Prompt Caching Is a Product Feature, Not Just an Infra Trick

    Why prompt caching changes latency, cost, and product design decisions — and why teams should treat it as a user-facing capability.

  4. What Agent Observability Should Actually Show You

    A practical view of agent observability: what to log, what to surface, and what teams need to understand before agents become trustworthy in production.

  5. How I Think About Model Routing in Production

    A practical way to think about model routing across cheap, fast, and strong models without turning your stack into a chaotic science project.

  6. MCP Feels Like the Missing UI Layer for Agents

    Why the Model Context Protocol matters: it gives agents a cleaner way to discover tools, carry context, and interact with software systems.

  7. When Not to Use RAG

    RAG is powerful, but it is not a default answer to every AI product problem. Here are the cases where I would avoid it or simplify it.

  8. Synthetic Data for LLM Evals: Useful, but Easy to Abuse

    Synthetic data can speed up AI evaluation pipelines, but only if it is used with strong guardrails and real-world calibration.