Industry Intelligence Radar

Format: Weekly high-signal briefs. Goal: To filter noise and focus on engineering impact.

Engineering Impact Reports

Week 1, 2025: The Rise of Small Reasoning Models

The News: DeepSeek and others are releasing "distilled" reasoning models (7B-14B parameters). The Noise: "AGI is here!", "Benchmarks are broken!" The Engineering Impact:

• Latency: You can now run "Chain of Thought" reasoning on-device or at edge latency (<200ms).
• Cost: "Thinking" is no longer premium. You can afford to add a reasoning step to every user interaction.
• Action: Evaluate shifting your Router agent from GPT-4o to a specialized 8B parameter reasoning model to save 90% cost with similar accuracy.

Deprecation Alerts (The "Stop Doing This" List)

Keeping up means knowing what to stop doing.

• Alert: Complex "Jailbreak-style" prompting for JSON.

  • Reason: Native Structured Outputs (OpenAI/Anthropic) now outperform clever prompt hacking.
  • Action: Delete your 50-line prompt instuctions about JSON formatting. Just use the API parameter.

• Alert: Naive RAG (Top-K Similarity).

  • Reason: Context windows are now 200k+.
  • Action: For documents under 50 pages, stop chunking. Just stuff the whole document into the context. It performs better than RAG. Only use RAG for massive datasets.