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Bill Zuo
Bill Zuo

Articles & Engineering Notes

Architecture designs, telemetry store deep-dives, and production reflections from building Softprobe.

Agent QA
•Bill Zuo

Context Over Index: What AI Coding Agents Actually Need to Operate Software

Why traditional APMs and prompt stacking fail autonomous coding agents, and why full runtime context graphs are the true fuel for production AI.

Core finding: Static Code vs. Runtime Reality: Code repositories only show how software is supposed to run; agents need the full runtime trace of variables, tool calls, and state transitions to solve complex production bugs.
#agent-qa#ai-infrastructure#observability#context-engineering#ducklake
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Observability
•Bill Zuo

The 200x Indexing Tax: Why Storing Telemetry Costs Cents but Searching It Costs Thousands

Why traditional log warehouses force teams to discard 90% of their runtime data, and how a session-graph architecture on S3/DuckLake collapses observability costs.

Core finding: The Storage vs. Search Gap: Storing 1 GB of logs in modern object storage (S3/Cloudflare R2) costs ~$0.015–$0.02 per month, but making that same gigabyte searchable in legacy log warehouses exceeds $5.00.
#observability#finops#cloud-computing#distributed-systems#ai-infrastructure
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Observability
•Bill Zuo

Fast Session Lists Without Abandoning Forever Evidence

How Softprobe keeps agent session triage snappy while the lake stays the single source of truth.

Core finding: Evidence lives only once in DuckLake traces: The lake is the durable source of truth; never duplicate raw spans into a warehouse.
#observability#agent-qa#distributed-systems#ducklake
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