Blog
Insights, analysis, and updates from the AI agent economy. Browse by tag · Browse the archive.
What Breaks When the Agent Calls Deploy: Production MCP Failure Modes and What a Deploy API Owes the Caller
Agent-tool calls fail in four repeatable ways: retries that double-execute, timeouts shorter than deploys, errors the model cannot act on, and silent definition drift. Each one dictates a concrete requirement for any deploy API that takes agents as callers.
Vercel Sandbox's $0.128 Active-CPU Hour vs E2B's $0.0504: Where Idle-Free Billing Wins — and Where Hetzner Wins by 28x
Vercel meters sandbox CPU only while active; E2B meters wall-clock at less than half the rate. A normalized 2 vCPU/4 GB cost comparison finds the crossover at about 32% utilization — and shows owned Hetzner hardware beating both by 14–28x for always-on fleets.
Vercel's Migration Tax Isn't the Hosting Bill — It's Edge Config, ISR, and the AI Gateway
Leaving Vercel means rebuilding three primitives with no drop-in equivalent: Edge Config's no-redeploy flag reads, ISR's shared-cache invalidation, and the AI Gateway's routing and budgets. A primitive-by-primitive inventory of what each rebuild actually costs on infrastructure you own.
Vercel's April Breach Was a Defaults Bug, Not Just a Hack: The Case for Sensitive-by-Default Secrets
Vercel's April 2026 breach exposed every customer environment variable not explicitly marked sensitive. Why the opt-in flag was the real vulnerability, how write-only secrets already solve it in production, and a five-property checklist for secrets handling that stays safe when developers forget.
Uptime Kuma vs Gatus: What a Click-Configured Status Page Costs a GitOps Fleet
Uptime Kuma has ten times the stars of Gatus, but stars don't pick a GitOps fleet's monitoring stack. A head-to-head on config-as-code, alerting breadth, and status pages — and which tool fits each job.
Your Ingress Is Now Your MCP Bouncer: What Traefik Hub's MCP Gateway Actually Enforces
Traefik Hub's MCP Gateway turns the ingress controller many self-hosted shops already run into the policy point for agent tool calls — OAuth discovery, JWT identity, task-based authorization, and session affinity in one middleware. A concrete breakdown of the five enforcement mechanics, a worked authorization example, and what gateway-mediated MCP means for standalone servers.
A Mini-PC With 128GB of Unified Memory Serves MoE Models at 63-97 Tok/s: What Strix Halo Does to Self-Hosted Inference Economics
A 128GB Strix Halo mini-PC serves MoE models at 63-97 tokens per second. The rent-vs-own math for agent-serving workloads — and why the box wins on privacy, not token arbitrage.
The Reverse Migration: Why Teams Quit Self-Hosting and Go Back to Managed PaaS
For every Heroku-to-Hetzner victory lap, a team quietly moves back to Render or Railway at four times the infrastructure cost. A catalog of the five failure modes behind the reverse migration — unpatched CVEs, untested backups, 2 a.m. pages, the single-node ceiling, bus factor of one — and the six-item checklist that keeps self-hosting alive.
What PR Preview Environments Really Cost: Render vs Railway vs Self-Hosted
Render and Railway both land near $40 a month for PR preview environments, but neither copies your data — and the self-hosted math flips past 30 PRs a month. A concrete rent-vs-build accounting.
Subscribe
New posts land in your reader as soon as they publish. Pick a format — all three carry the same posts.
Current feeds keep roughly two days of posts so daily polling does not miss a burst. Older entries stay reachable from the feed's next-page link in readers that follow it, or from the blog archive.
Following one topic instead? Browse tags