AI & Automation
Blocking Agent Polling Got Us 273 'echo waiting' Turns
We blocked an agent's polling and it sent 273 echo turns. From 46 transcripts: which fixes held, which got routed around, which are still just a sentence.
Oct 9, 2026
Articles by Dzmitry Vladyka (45)
AI & Automation
Our AI Agents Credited Charts to Data We Don't Have
Our AI pipeline put a source line under charts built on data we never had. Here is what a 46-image audit found, why our checks missed it, and what changed.
Oct 8, 2026
Engineering
A New Enum Value Breaks Clients That Trusted Your List
A new enum value passes every schema diff and still breaks clients that validate responses. Read as text, send from a closed list, and mark it Breaking.
Oct 7, 2026
AI & Automation
Failed Is Not a Terminal Status: A Contract for Agents
A run can fail on our own timeout while the paid work can still finish. Why an agent should not treat failed as a terminal status without a reason it can read.
Oct 6, 2026
Startup Ops
I Used to Handle Marketing. Now I Manage Coding Agents Too.
Coding agents have changed my working day. I still have to decide who the products are for, and I want more than my own assumptions to work with.
Sep 29, 2026
Startup Ops
AI UGC for $0? Seedance 2.5 Still Bills the Retakes
Seedance 2.5 made one AI UGC take cheap and folded voice and lip-sync into it. The $0 posts count one kept take, not the retakes, the script, or the face.
Sep 28, 2026
Startup Ops
AI Avatar Pricing Has No Common Unit. Here Is One.
One launch page lists four starting prices for the same AI avatar model. How to turn AI avatar pricing into one comparable number, and where you can't.
Sep 25, 2026
Startup Ops
What One Second of AI Video Costs Us, Layer by Layer
One clip passes through five paid layers. We measured one of them with a wallet. The rest are price lists and estimates, and that gap is the honest answer.
Sep 24, 2026
Engineering
The Bill Is Authorised by Delivery, Not by Your Spend
Paying a vendor feels like it should authorise charging the client. It does not, and the wording that says it does once billed 900 credits for a video that did not exist.
Sep 18, 2026
Startup Ops
Nobody Selling AI Video Will Tell You What a Video Costs
Three vendors, three pricing pages, and not one of them answers what a thirty-second video costs. The unit is credits, and what a credit buys is left undefined.
Sep 18, 2026
Startup Ops
The Cheapest Way to Run an AI Product Is to Not Pay for It
Three products now let the user's own Claude plan pay for inference. Anthropic's terms permit one shape of that and ban another, and you cannot tell which.
Sep 17, 2026
AI & Automation
We Shipped an Agent-Native API Without OpenAPI
No /openapi.json, no generator, no spec to drift. The machine-readable entry point is the MCP server's tools/list — and that turned out to be the honest choice, not the lazy one.
Sep 17, 2026