When a Small Language Model Beat Our LLM in Production: Right-Sizing Your Models The team invested in a state-of-the-art large language model, reasoning that more capability would translate directly to better outcomes. The infrastructure was built to serve this model. The APIs were optimized for its specifications. Deployment happened. And then the metrics came back: […]
This week, something new–I’ve split out my introductory essay pulling on the threads of this week’s reading from the articles themselves. So you can read either, or both! In other news… Introducing Noops Long time Web Directions speaker and friend Mark Pesce and I have sorted something new, Noops. Part research, part advisory, part punk, […]
The past week’s reading (read my breakdown of nearly 2 dozen articles here)—from across Phoronix to Stripe, from Answer.AI to the fringe blogs that are like canaries in the industry coal mine—points toward a the ongoing reorientation of the entire software development lifecycle. It’s not that AI makes code faster to write. It’s that AI, […]
Your Agents Pass Every Benchmark—Then Memory Breaks Them in Production There's a pattern that's starting to repeat across organizations experimenting with AI agents. The benchmarks look phenomenal. In controlled testing environments, the agent answers questions correctly, completes tasks reliably, and behaves exactly as expected. Your evaluation metrics are solid. Leadership is impressed. Then you deploy […]
How Many Agents Are Too Many? The Hidden Cost of Multi-Agent Systems The multi-agent architecture has become the aspirational design pattern for ambitious AI systems. The logic is appealing: distribute reasoning across specialized agents, orchestrate their collaboration, and watch them tackle problems that single models struggle with. But somewhere between the whiteboard architecture and production […]
This week we have almost certainly the biggest roundup of articles ever in a Weekend Reading–going all the way back to about 2006. We also announced a significant number of speakers for AI Engineer across all tracks. This one is selling fast, so start planning now! And while it’s still a bit further off, at […]
Last week, I observed, in the words of Taylor Swift, that there is a lot going on right now. So it’s ironic that this week I only managed to amplify two posts of the many that I read on the web. But I did manage to post two longer articles, and I sat down with […]
Virtual reality isn’t the television of the future, it is the telephone of the future Background We’re in a time and place where anything is possible; much like at the birth of the World Wide Web We are at least 98% identical to chimpanzees. We have now found the gene that gives us a bigger […]
Screen magnifiers make graphic text blurry, but alt attributes still render as proper text If we’re not writing scripts to suppress the right click menu, perhaps we should avoid suppressing the showing of alt text on images in IE Square brackets are often used to separate links to different document formats; when read through a […]
Public health warning – there will be code! Taking notes on a code-heavy presentation is a difficult challenge; I strongly recommend you grab Jeremy’s presentation slides to accompany these notes. AJAX is often treated as all or nothing technology, much like plugins – either you have it, or you don’t. Ideally you want to have […]
MP3 of presentation (to come) Transcript (to come) Presentation slides Session description LiveBlog post About Cameron Adams and Kevin Yank Presentation slides Session description Adding JavaScript to your portfolio used to mean more work. Thanks to the wide range of APIs springing up from the likes of Google (Mail, Maps, Ads, Calendar, Search, etc.), Yahoo! […]
Cheryl’s experience with Virgin Money I’m going to save the world by making my company go to web standards – Cheryl Lead Used numbers to sell the idea X more applicants if we make it accessible 400,000 legally blind web users in the UK. Tesco launched Tesco Access and made 13 million pounds more via […]
I’m not going to talk about CSS today, I’m hardly going to mention standards Art is design without compromise – Jeffrey Veen Limitations of what we do: Environmental – inflexibility of 2D screen; Materials – limitations of CSS et all; Medium – poor support in older browsers; Ourselves – unlearning what we have learned from […]
Vast chasm between what consumers understand the web to be and what is required of us to build the web. Mum doesn’t need to know XML, XHTML et all to get online, post photos, have a blog. This is fantastic and needs to remain. The chasm has gotten worse since the early days of the […]
where are we right now Checklist syndrome – Section 508, WCAG, IBM Web Accessibility. These lead to a mindset of compliance over anything else. Accessibility is not just a technical endeavour or a quality assurance process. In reality accessibility is about removing barriers; it is personal. Derek demonstrates a ‘typical’ search bar – mentions that […]
Web Directions South is the must-attend event of the year for anyone serious about web development
Phil Whitehouse General Manager, DT Sydney
