Notes on engineering, platforms, and building with AI.
Saman Mathew Badakhshan. Principal Engineer working on applied AI, London. Local inference and general engineering along the way.
Writing
All posts- Pinned AI · agentic · engineering
Agentic Engineering — A Plain-English Glossary
Terms, patterns, and tools used when you build systems that let AI agents do work. Just what each thing is and what it means.
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M6 Mac mini and M5 Mac Studio: How Much Do You Need for Local AI?
Apple opened pre-orders for the M5 Mac Studio and M6 Mac mini. I simulated all 13 configurations through llmfit against today's open models. Buy by RAM tier, not chip name: 32GB covers chat and documents, 128GB covers serious daily local work, 256GB opens the 400B class, and even 512GB will not replace Claude or Codex.
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Your AI Coding Assistant Is Burning Through Your Budget. Here's Why.
A walkthrough of what tokens are, how LLMs generate text one piece at a time, and why agentic coding burns through them so fast — with worked math.
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What the AI Doomers and Dismissers Both Miss
Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of Take-Two, offered a grounded take on AI from the top of a creative empire. Here's why his framing maps onto the research — and what each side of the debate gets half right.