Your MCP Tool Works. The Model Still Won't Call It.

A controlled study of MCP tool adoption: 0 calls in 63 turns with 30 mentions of the tool, zero in 114 turns with the answers already in the store — and the harness injection that flipped it.

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I Deleted Every Ranking Heuristic From My Code Search Engine

3,817 lines of query-side if/else, deleted in one commit — with the measured evidence for why keyword branches can never rank code search, and the two index-time priors that separated canonical from look-alike.

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Embedding Dilution: Why Semantic Code Search Misses the Answer

The target function's docstring paraphrased my query almost word for word, yet it ranked below 200 look-alikes — because everything else in the chunk averaged it away. A measured post-mortem, and the dual-vector fix it shipped.

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What Actually Survives /compact in Claude Code: An Empirical Map

We forced 100+ compactions across two instrumented runs and graded, fact by fact, what the boundary keeps and what silently dies — with the survival curve, the confabulation, and the honest costs.

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The Four Families of Context Relief for LLM Coding Agents

Eviction, offload-and-recall, retrieval-over-stuffing, and subagent isolation — the four ways to keep a coding agent from drowning in its own context, and why they only work when composed.

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Building Vectr, Part 3: What the Benchmark Numbers Actually Mean

How I benchmarked an AI code editor tool without fooling myself — the research vs implementation distinction that makes a +19% headline misleading, the 5 of 6 CPython tasks where re-discovery dropped, and the limitations that decide whether any of it applies to you.

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