What is AI engineering and what do AI engineers even do?

February 23
1h 56m

Episode Description

Links


- CodeCrafters (Sponsor): https://tej.as/codecrafters

- The Rise of the AI Engineer (Latent Space): https://www.latentspace.com/p/ai-engineer

- Anthropic Model Context Protocol (MCP): https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-context-protocol

Anthropic Skills (SKILL.md): https://resources.anthropic.com/hubfs/The-Complete-Guide-to-Building-Skill-for-Claude.pdf?hsLang=en

- Pratim Bhosale on Vector Search (Previous Episode): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJcrI1GbDec

- OpenClaw (Official Repository): https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw

- WormGPT/Prompt Injection Incident (The Verge Reference): https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/881574/cline-openclaw-prompt-injection-hack


Summary


In this episode, I’m finally breaking down what AI Engineering actually looks like in 2026. We’ve moved past the "wow" phase of demos into the hard reality of production, where models lie, costs spike, and security is a nightmare. I define the role formally—separating it from ML engineering—and dive deep into the three core problems we solve daily: hallucinations, real-time knowledge, and context engineering.


I also explore the explosion of agent runtimes, specifically dissecting OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot/Moltbot) and why its open-source, device-local approach is winning. We talk about the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the new SKILL.md standard from Anthropic, and why I believe multi-agent concurrency is the inevitable future of software.


Chapters


00:00:00 Intro: The "Monday Morning" AI Nightmare

00:08:15 What is AI Engineering?

00:21:00 AI Engineers vs. ML Engineers

00:36:20 Problem 1: Hallucinations

00:48:30 Problem 2: Real-Time Knowledge

00:59:00 Problem 3: Context Engineering

01:13:00 Agents

01:17:30 MCP (Model Context Protocol) Explained

01:22:30 SKILL.md: The New Standard

01:39:00 The 2026 Trend: Multi-Agent Concurrency

01:42:30 Build Your Own OpenClaw

01:52:00 Conclusion: Moving from Talk to Action

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