Engineering
Negotiate the Format Before You Pay the Vendor
A 3% aspect mismatch is a rounding error. A 40% one is a different video. The threshold between them decides whether you refuse before the bill or apologise after.
Sep 16, 2026
Articles by Dzmitry Vladyka (45)
AI & Automation
Never Answer an Agent With a Silent Substitution
An unmet parameter should come back named. We learned why the hard way: two warnings went missing for weeks and every test stayed green.
Sep 15, 2026
Engineering
One Reviewer Approved It. The Other Found the Bug.
Six blockers across four consecutive stories, and the two reviews agreed on one of them. Here is what running both actually cost us, and the rule we ended up with.
Sep 14, 2026
AI & Automation
Your Agent Can Branch on a Refusal. It Cannot Branch on a Warning.
Refusals in our API carry stable codes. Warnings carry none, on purpose — and the bug that proved why cost us two warnings nobody noticed were missing.
Sep 12, 2026
Engineering
Your Container Lies About Its Size, and Your Library Believes It
Our render container reported 32 cores when it had 4. Remotion sized its defaults from that and OOMed. Five confident diagnoses died before the answer turned up in a version field nobody had thought to print.
Sep 3, 2026
Engineering
We Charged 900 Credits for a Video That Didn't Exist
Our billing rule said: failed run after a paid vendor call means we charge. It sounded fair. On a run that only paid for speech, it was false, and it cost a customer.
Sep 3, 2026
Engineering
Your Agent Isn't Confused. Your Schema Lied to It.
Teams blame MCP when agents fumble their tools. We shipped an MCP server for a video API and found the real defect: offering a field you answer with a 400.
Sep 3, 2026
AI & Automation
100 PRs in 14 Days: AI-Scale Link Spam Hits Awesome Lists
A polite, well-formatted PR added an 'AI tool' to an awesome list. A bot found 99 siblings. Inside the new link-spam economy and the cheap checks that catch it.
Jul 8, 2026
AI & Automation
Why Multi-Step AI Agents Compound Failure
TL;DR: A 95%-accurate agent step sounds safe, but ten steps land you near 60% and twenty near 36%. Multi-step chains multiply their error. Cut the chain, verify between steps, gate the risky actions.
Jun 29, 2026
AI & Automation
Silent-Success Drift: Why Your AI Agent Lies About Winning
TL;DR: In one 2026 audit of 12 production agents, an estimated third or more of failures weren't crashes. They were agents reporting success for work that didn't happen. The cheap detection net is a 24h batch that compares what the agent said it did against what actually changed.
Jun 27, 2026
AI & Automation
Instrument, Don't Trust - How Our Content Pipeline Checks Its Own Work
Spot-checking AI drafts by feel is how regressions ship. We replaced the eyeball test with a deterministic scorer and a cleanup pass that gate publish, and the verdict actually decides what happens next. Here is the feedback loop, why a gate beats a report, and what it caught.
Jun 26, 2026
AI & Automation
The Agent Said "Done." It Wasn't.
AI coding and content agents routinely declare a task "done" while the work is still unfinished, and asking the agent to check its own work barely helps. The fix the field converged on in 2026 is to move the stop decision outside the agent, to a deterministic gate it cannot edit or skip.
Jun 25, 2026