# Essays by Rohit Ghumare

Canonical URL: https://rohitghumare.com/blog/

Last updated: 2026-09-03

Original essays about AI agents, harnesses, protocols, memory, inference, and software engineering. Entries are grouped by subject so an agent can select the narrowest relevant source.

## Agent protocols and instruction files

- [The Model Hardware Standard: Read, Write, and the Plate That Must Be There](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/model-hardware-standard/): read and write primitives for lab and factory devices, pre-execution validation, and where MHS sits next to MCP and A2A.
- [MCP's New Roadmap: Events Without Sessions, Identity Without API Keys](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/mcp-roadmap-after-stateless/): the August 2026 roadmap read against the stateless core: multi round-trip requests, subscriptions without sessions, DPoP and workload identity, and the catalog tax.
- [All About the A2A Protocol, Now Part of the Agentic AI Foundation](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/a2a-protocol/): A2A v1.0 transports, streaming rules, server and client code, webhooks, and agent-card signing.
- [Stateless MCP: The Protocol Deleted Its Own Handshake](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/stateless-mcp/): the MCP 2026-07-28 stateless core, request lifecycle, and load balancing.
- [The AGENTS.md Practices Nobody Uses](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/agents-md-best-practices/): token budgets, nearest-file precedence, resolution order, and security boundaries.
- [The AGENTS.md Genre](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/agents-md-genre/): instruction files as a form of technical writing addressed to machine readers.

## Coding-agent harnesses

- [Fable 5.1 Burned the Meter in Twenty Minutes](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/fable-burned-the-meter/): the launch-day burn reports, API price versus plan meter, effort and subagent multipliers, and the Claude Code knobs.
- [Claude Has Two Meters. The 20x Is Only on One.](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/claude-two-meters/): the five-hour meter, the weekly meter, the September 14 arithmetic, and what drains each.
- [OpenAI Cut Cursor Off. Five Percent Is the Interesting Number.](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/openai-cuts-cursor/): the change-of-control clock, the harness surfaces a vendor cutoff breaks, and re-routing the reported 5%.
- [The Bulletin Board: How Isolated Agents Built a Message Bus Out of a Package Registry](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/the-bulletin-board/): the OpenAI evaluation incident where sandboxed agents turned a package registry into a message board, the dated climb, and what isolation has to mean.
- [Grok Bot: The Agent Got a Computer. Your Bots Share It.](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/grok-bot-shared-computer/): an always-on cloud computer shared by every Bot on an account, the Cursor infrastructure underneath, the clone wave, and what isolation should mean.
- [The Harness, Not the Model](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/coding-agent-harnesses/): a comparison of major coding-agent harnesses and the costs created around the model.
- [Claude Has Levels. Most People Stop at Two.](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/claude-code-levels/): nine levels from chat to managed agent fleets.
- [Inside the Pi Harness: The Agent That Shows You the Meter](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/inside-the-pi-harness/): session trees, a small system prompt, cache behavior, and cost visibility.
- [Inside the Claude Code Harness: The System Prompt Machine](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/inside-the-claude-code-harness/): prompt layers, memory placement, and cache-preserving architecture.
- [Inside the Codex Harness: Compaction as an API Primitive](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/inside-the-codex-harness/): compaction paths, summary placement, and sealed state.
- [Kimi CLI and K3: The Newest Harness Has the Strangest Ideas](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/kimi-cli-k3-harness/): shell integration, checkpoints, preserved thinking, and agent swarms.
- [The Composable Harness: How Agents Actually Get Reliable](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/composable-agent-runtime/): agents composed from workers, triggers, functions, and durable execution.
- [Harness Engineering: The Real Leverage Is Around the Model](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/harness-engineering/): context, tools, loops, and proof with the model held fixed.
- [Harness Engineering in Practice: Stop Agents Building the Wrong Thing](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/stop-agents-building-the-wrong-thing/): discovery, duplicate prevention, and system-level feedback for coding agents.

## Memory and knowledge systems

- [The LLM Wiki: Stop Retrieving, Start Compounding](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/the-llm-wiki/): a maintained knowledge layer that compiles and updates information over time.
- [LLM Wiki v2: What Breaks at Scale](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/llm-wiki-v2/): confidence, supersession, forgetting, consolidation, graphs, and hybrid search.
- [OpenWiki: The LLM Wiki Pattern as Running Code](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/openwiki/): two implementations of a generate, search, refresh, and lint lifecycle.

## Inference systems and economics

- [Four Flash Models in Four Months. The Bill Per Task Went Up 40%.](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/flash-cadence/): same price per token, about 40% more per task, effort-level economics, and the January 1 price cliff.
- [Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1: One Model, Two Doors](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/fable-5-1-two-doors/): one model behind two safeguard doors, the cache-read price cut, and the restricted-twin release pattern across three labs.
- [DFlash 2: The Drafter Stopped Guessing Alone](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/dflash-2-keep-drafting-parallel/): why parallel block drafting stutters, the pairwise path selector and two-tap convolution that fix it, and the published acceptance and throughput numbers.
- [The Inference Engine Underneath](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/inference-engines/): vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM, LMDeploy, TGI, throughput, and tail latency.
- [Tokens per Second Is a Memory Bandwidth Number](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/tokens-per-second-memory-bandwidth/): model weight bytes, memory bandwidth, and decode-speed estimation.
- [The Inference Bill: Why AI's Best Customers Lose the Most Money](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/the-inference-bill/): recurring inference cost, cost per token, and AI unit economics.

## Software engineering and technical work

- [Fifty Startups Coming Next](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/the-next-fifty/): fifty company ideas across the agent stack, with four working demos.
- [Graph Engineering Is 290 Years Old](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/graph-engineering/): Euler, structural abstraction, and a research-agent DAG.
- [The Forward Deployed Engineer: The Job the AI Industry Paid Billions to Rediscover](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/forward-deployed-engineer/): why the FDE role returned and what weak imitations miss.
- [What a Forward Deployed Engineer Actually Does](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/what-a-forward-deployed-engineer-does/): deliverables, pod structure, sourced pay, and role-evaluation questions.
- [New Names, Old Fundamentals: Decoding the Agent Era's Rebrands](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/new-names-old-fundamentals/): agent-era terms mapped back to established engineering practices.
- [Your Codebase Has a Second Reader Now](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/codebase-second-reader/): readability practices reconsidered for human and machine readers.
- [Your "Row Changed" Hook Isn't CDC: The Dual-Write Trap](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/dual-write-trap/): lossy post-commit notifications, the outbox pattern, and change data capture.
- [How to Become an AI Engineer in 2026: A Complete Roadmap](https://rohitghumare.com/blog/how-to-become-an-ai-engineer/): skill order, routes into the field, and a code-first curriculum.

## Other indexes

- Full cross-platform writing list: https://rohitghumare.com/
- Local-model and engine guides: https://rohitghumare.com/guides/index.md
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