Field notes · Updated weekly
Writing for builders, not browsers.
Career strategy, technical deep-dives, hiring patterns, and honest takes from working engineers. No SEO filler. No course-mill copy.
Articles
SHOWING 3 OF 3career·12 MIN
The AI Engineer job market in 2026: who's actually hiring, and for what
We pulled 4,200 AI engineering listings across the last six months and untangled the ten role archetypes hiding behind the same job title. Plus what each one actually pays.
AR
Aanya Rao
May 8, 2026
ai·9 MIN
RAG isn't a system, it's a 12-stage failure surface
Where retrieval pipelines actually break in production, and the eval harness that catches it before users do.
DK
Daniel Kim
May 1, 2026
engineering·7 MIN
The postmortem template that makes incidents worth the pain
A structured format for turning outages into institutional knowledge — and actually following through on action items.
JL
Jamie Liu
Mar 31, 2026
The trail dispatch · weekly
One letter every Sunday. Nothing else.
The week's best writing on AI, careers, and the craft — curated by working engineers. No drip campaigns, no sponsored anything.
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