Notes from a CTO who has to put agents into production. Every post says what I ran, what it cost, and whether I'd use it.
The Muse Spark Open license lets a startup ship commercially for free, with two catches. I read it, ran the API maths, and checked the usage policy.
Python 3.15 lazy imports took my test AI CLI from 2,514.6 ms to 14.1 ms at startup. The benchmark, three traps I hit, and when to skip it.
SolidCraft MCP is an open-source CAD server for AI agents. I ran it: great design, one trap where ok:true meant nothing changed. How to guard against it.
ESP32 iPhone Agent lets a vision model tap a real iPhone through a $7 board. I ran its tests and did the token maths for one 20-step task.
Talorys is an MIT-licensed free AI agent that runs in your Cloudflare account. I did the Neuron maths to see how many chat turns a day it really buys.
I ran Cactus Whistle, a 16.9 MB open speech-to-text model, on Québec French, accented English and noise. Here is what it got wrong.
I tried to install the MXC sandbox v1.0.0 on Linux and it failed on node-pty. Here is what it takes to run LLM-written code at a small startup.
WebMCP lets a web page hand tools to a browser agent. I ran it in Chromium 153, hit one real bug, and sketched a half-day Trellis experiment.
ts-rust ported the TypeScript compiler to Rust with agents. I ran it and read its own numbers: the codebase port cost $24k after a $400k stall.
