Fundamentals
28 guides tagged “Fundamentals”.
- What Is an Agent Runtime? An agent runtime is the service that runs the loop: it schedules steps, enforces tool policy, stores state, and records what happened.
- What Is Rate Limiting for AI Coding Tools? AI coding tools rate-limit on requests, tokens, and concurrency, usually in rolling windows. Hitting a limit is a capacity signal, not a bug.
- What Are Agent Skills (and What Is a SKILL.md File)? An Agent Skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md that tells an agent how to perform one job. The agent loads it only when the task matches.
- What Is Agent Memory (and Why Does Your Agent Forget)? Agent memory is whatever the harness carries across sessions: files, summaries, and retrieval. Context inside a session is not memory.
- What Is Agentic Engineering (and How Is It Different From Vibe Coding)? Agentic engineering is directing agents inside an engineering process: specs, review, tests, and limits. Vibe coding skips the process.
- What Is the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF)? The Agentic AI Foundation is a Linux Foundation body that hosts vendor-neutral agent standards, including MCP, AGENTS.md, and Agent Skills.
- Build vs Deploy vs Release: What's the Difference? Building produces an artifact, deploying runs it, releasing exposes it. Separating the three is what makes rollback and canaries possible.
- China ICP License Requirements: What You Need Before You Apply Requirements split into entity, domain, hosting, content, and identity checks. One inconsistent item is the usual reason an application is returned.
- Do You Need CI/CD for a Solo Project? A solo developer gets less from coordination and more from memory. The smallest pipeline worth maintaining, and what to skip.
- What Are the Stages of a CI/CD Pipeline? A CI/CD pipeline runs source, build, test, package, deploy, and verify. Here is what each stage outputs and which ones a small project can skip.
- Continuous Integration vs Continuous Delivery: What's the Difference? CI proves every commit integrates and passes tests. Continuous delivery keeps it releasable. Different practices, different failure modes.
- How Long Does ICP Filing Take? Plan about a month from a complete submission. Entity setup, domain verification, and correction loops take longer than the provincial review.
- Types of ICP License: Filing, Commercial, and EDI Compared Filing is the non-commercial record; the commercial ICP license permits charging; EDI covers transactions. Choosing the wrong track is costly.
- What Is a Build Artifact (and Why Does Yours Keep Breaking)? A build artifact is the immutable output of a build, identified by a digest. Passing it between stages stops environments from diverging.
- NPU vs GPU: What's the Difference? An NPU is a fixed-function accelerator for low-power inference; a GPU is programmable and built for training and flexible serving.
- vCPU vs Core: What's the Difference? A core is physical; a vCPU is a scheduling unit the hypervisor exposes, often one hyperthread. The mapping depends on the instance family.
- Service Account vs API Key: Which Should You Use? A service account is an identity with permissions; an API key is a bearer credential. Confusing the two leads to keys with more access than needed.
- What Is a Design Doc (and Do You Need One)? A design doc records the problem, options, decision, and trade-offs. It is where architecture reasoning survives after the chat window closes.
- Hardware for AI Builders: How the Machine Your Code Runs On Actually Works A zero-jargon guide to computer hardware for people who build with AI: what a CPU, RAM, SSD, GPU, and data-centre server actually do, and how to size a machine for your app.
- Latency Numbers Every Developer Should Know The order-of-magnitude costs of memory, disk, network, and API calls — and why each step up the ladder is a different kind of slow.
- What Is a CPU (and Why More Cores Isn't Always Faster)? A CPU executes instructions one at a time per core. Learn what cores, clock speed, cache, and instruction sets actually do, and why a slower-looking chip often wins.
- Cores vs Threads: What Hyperthreading Actually Buys You A core executes; a thread is a stream of work. SMT lets two streams share one core, which helps some workloads and slows others. Here is what the spec sheet means.
- What Is RAM (and Why Does Your App Run Out of Memory)? RAM is the fast, temporary workspace every running program shares. Learn how capacity, bandwidth, and ECC differ, and why hitting the memory ceiling kills your app instantly.
- How a Program Actually Runs: From Your Python to the CPU What happens between pressing enter and the CPU doing work: bytecode, compilers, syscalls, the kernel, and why containers do not change any of it.
- What Is an NPU (and Do You Need an 'AI PC')? NPUs are small fixed-function AI accelerators now shipping in laptops and phones. Learn what they are good at, what TOPS means, and why they are not a substitute for a GPU.
- Bits, Bytes, and Bandwidth: The Units Behind Every Spec Sheet Why a 512 GB drive shows 476 GB, why 1 Gbps is not 1 GB/s, and how to read a hardware spec sheet without being fooled by the units.
- PC vs Data Center Server: Why a Server Looks Slower and Costs More A server is not a bigger PC. ECC memory, redundant power, out-of-band management, and 1U chassis explain why it is slower per core, louder, and far more expensive.
- What Is a GPU (and Why Is It Different From a CPU)? A GPU is thousands of simple cores built to do the same operation on huge blocks of numbers at once. Learn why that is exactly what AI needs and when it is the wrong tool.