AI agents
Alex covers AI agents that work with data: agentic analytics, the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and what an agent needs before it can query a lakehouse and return a correct answer.
Below are his articles, videos and podcast episodes on those topics, newest first, pulled from his feeds.
Articles
Turning an Analytics Question Into a Verified Agentic Graph
A complete AGS 1.0 graph for governed metric questions, with verification gates, deterministic check scripts, and reconciliation against a semantic la...
AI Weekly: Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Sol and Luna, and MCPA
Week of September 16 to 23, 2026 Continue reading on Medium »...
How Apache Ossie Is Deciding What Agents and BI Tools Can Ask a Semantic Layer
How Apache Ossie's layered query design gives AI agents both a constrained dimensional interface and a grain-safe SQL interface for semantic layers....
AI Weekly: DeepSeek Cuts Prices as Agents Go Hosted
AI Weekly: DeepSeek Cuts Prices as Agents Go Hosted
Week of September 10 to 17, 2026...
AI Weekly: Four Frontier Models in Seven Days
Agentic Data Architecture
A six-layer reference architecture for agents on company data: planners, tool boundaries, identity, the semantic layer, and what breaks when a layer i...
Context Engineering for Data Agents
Why text-to-SQL accuracy collapses on enterprise schemas, the five kinds of context an agent needs, where each one hides, and how to make the semantic...
Guardrails for AI on Company Data
The control surfaces that actually contain damage once an agent is fooled: identity, permissions, audit trails, and prompt injection at the query laye...
The Data Team of the Agentic Era: Generalists Owning End-to-End Workflows
The case for generalists owning end-to-end data workflows with agents, the counterargument, and how to make the transition work....
Open Standards for Agentic Harnesses
Every team that gets serious about AI agents hits the same wall, usually around month three....
AI Weekly: Qwen4 Preview, Hot Chips, and Agent Tools Go GA
Week of August 19 to 26, 2026...
Your Agent Should Answer the Phone: A Field Guide to AI Gateways on Slack, Discord, Telegram, Signal, and Teams
The most useful thing my terminal agent ever did happened while I was nowhere near a terminal....
Graphs in AI Engineering Have Solved Three Problems. The Fourth Is the Plan.
Ask an agent to ship a feature and watch what it does....
Agent-Driven Storage Tiering for Apache Iceberg: Moving Cold Data Without Breaking Queries
A background agent can move cold Iceberg partitions to cheaper tiers without breaking live queries. Heatmaps, path-safe moves, and restore paths....
Securing the Agentic Lakehouse Gateway: Preventing Prompt Injection and Data Exfiltration
Agentic lakehouse gateways face prompt injection and exfiltration through query results. A threat model and defenses for the layer in front of data....
Metric Contracts in Code: Testing, Versioning, and Serving Business Logic to Multi-Agent Systems
Metric contracts in code let teams test, version, and serve business logic to multi-agent systems without each agent inventing its own SQL....
Query Routing at Machine Scale: Dynamic Workload Distribution Across Lakehouse Engines
Route each lakehouse query by shape, not by sender. Signals, rules, and how to keep dashboards, batch jobs, and agents from sharing one engine....
The Agent Is Now a Named Coworker, and It Needs a File Format
Open your terminal and count the agent CLIs installed on it....
The Agent Is Now a Named Coworker, and It Needs a File Format
Named, persistent agents need a file format. Open Agent Profile, Buzz, Grok Bot, and Hermes Bot Mode show why a portable agent identity matters....
Your Agent Should Answer the Phone: A Field Guide to AI Gateways on Slack, Discord, Telegram, Signal, and Teams
A field guide to AI gateways on Slack, Discord, Telegram, Signal, and Teams: architecture, auth, cost, and the failure modes that matter....
Graphs in AI Engineering Have Solved Three Problems. The Fourth Is the Plan.
Knowledge graphs, GraphRAG, and LangGraph solved three problems. The fourth is the work itself: a reviewable graph of bounded agentic loops....
The Five Layers of an Agentic Lakehouse
The five layers of an agentic lakehouse: Storage, Catalog, Semantic, Gateway, and Agent Surface, and how one question travels through all of them....
Goal-Directed Data Quality Agents: Anomaly Quarantine on Apache Iceberg
Goal-directed data quality agents that watch Apache Iceberg tables, detect anomalies, and quarantine suspect data safely with snapshot isolation and b...
Managing the TCO of Agentic Analytics: Token Budgets, Query Throttles, and the Economics of Autonomy
Managing the total cost of agentic analytics: token budgets, query throttles, unit economics, and the FinOps discipline that keeps AI spend under cont...
Metric Contracts in 2026: Standardizing Business Logic Across Multi-Agent Frameworks
Metric contracts in 2026: versioned, testable definitions of business logic that let multi-agent frameworks compute revenue identically, with OSI inte...
Query Routing at Machine Scale: Multi-Engine Workload Distribution for the Agentic Lakehouse
Query routing at machine scale for the agentic lakehouse: engine selection, acceleration substitution, admission control, and placement....
Securing the Agentic Lakehouse Gateway: A Threat Model for Prompt Injection, Exfiltration, and the Firewall That Reads Sentences
A threat model for the agentic lakehouse gateway covering prompt injection, exfiltration, and the firewall that reads sentences....
Semantic Layer Federation: One Meaning for Data That Lives Everywhere
Build a federated semantic layer across multi-cloud data so one set of governed metric definitions serves BI tools, dashboards, and AI agents identica...
Building Stateless AI Tool Gateways with FastMCP, the 2026 MCP Spec, and Kubernetes
How to build stateless AI tool gateways with FastMCP, the 2026 MCP specification, and Kubernetes, and why statelessness finally makes MCP scale....
The Plan and the Worker: Two Open Specifications for Agent Harnesses
Two open specifications, the Agentic Graph Specification and the Open Agent Profile, turn agent plans and agent identity into portable, reviewable fil...
Budgeting for Agentic Analytics When Every Question Costs Something Different
Budgeting for agentic analytics when every question costs something different: token economics, query economics, instrumentation, and the cost control...
The Five Layers of an Agentic Lakehouse and Where the MCP Server Sits
The five layers of an agentic lakehouse and where the MCP server sits: storage, catalog, semantic layer, MCP gateway, and agent surface, plus identity...
Wiring Analytical Queries to Transactional APIs in Closed-Loop Decision Agents
Wiring analytical queries to transactional APIs in closed-loop decision agents: conditional writes, sagas with compensations, decision records, and bl...
Surviving Optimistic Commit Collisions When Hundreds of Agents Write to Iceberg
Surviving optimistic commit collisions when hundreds of agents write to Iceberg: which conflicts are real, commit buffers, partitioning, and the patte...
Why Agentic AI Needs a Governed Semantic Layer Behind the Model Context Protocol
Why agentic AI needs a governed semantic layer behind the Model Context Protocol: metric consistency, access control, Apache Ossie for portable....
Moving From Supply Chain Dashboards to Decision Loops With the Model Context Protocol
Moving from supply chain dashboards to decision loops with MCP: sense, decide, act, and verify, with typed action tools, idempotency keys, and graduat...
Metric Contracts as the Interface AI Agents Actually Need
Metric contracts as the interface AI agents need: calculation, inclusion rules, grain, temporal semantics, ownership, semantic versioning, and testing...
Guardrails for Analytics Agents That Do More Than Answer Questions
The risk isn't agents going rogue, it's agents acting correctly on bad input at machine speed....
Building Agent Telemetry Tables in Iceberg That Survive an Audit
A practical guide to building agent decision traces in Apache Iceberg that support audit reconstruction, governance review, and cost attribution....
What Agentic Analytics Actually Costs, and How to Keep It Bounded
Agent analytics generates two cost streams that scale on different variables. Here's the arithmetic, the levers that actually move the number, and how...
When the Query Optimizer Starts Managing Its Own Materializations
Autonomous materialized view management replaces quarterly review meetings with workload-driven scoring, and it's essential when AI agents generate....
Why AI Agents Fail on Raw Data, and What to Give Them Instead
Agents fail on raw lake data because business rules live in people's heads. Data products with semantic contracts fix this at the source....
The Five Layers Between Your Lakehouse and a Trustworthy Agent
Agent reliability is a property of the stack the model sits on. Five layers with distinct owners and failure modes turn the agent is unreliable....
Surviving Commit Conflicts When Dozens of Writers Hit the Same Iceberg Table
Commit conflicts multiply with writer count, and AI agents introduce unpredictable write patterns....
Wiring an AI Agent to Apache Polaris with the Model Context Protocol
The catalog is the right attachment point for AI agents working against a lakehouse. Here's how to wire the official Polaris MCP Server and add the re...
Governing What Agents Cost You
Agents break the four assumptions analytics platforms were built on. A practical guide to identity, budgets, semantic layers, caching, and instrumenta...
Three Vendors Are Rebuilding the Path From Transaction to Agent
Databricks, Snowflake, and SAP are closing the gap between operational databases and analytical platforms through acquisition, betting on different la...
Podcast episodes

AI Models & Agentic Harnesses, Graph Engineering, Gaming on Android Devices, Dispatch

Understanding AI Agent Skills, MCP and Custom GPTs/Gems

Understanding AI Agent Skills, MCP and Custom GPTs/Gems

Embracing AI Disruption and AI Tooling

Embracing AI Disruption and AI Tooling

2025 Reflections, Google Antigravity, NotebookLM, Dremio AI Agent, Pangolin Catalog, Dremioframe & Iceframe Python Libraries for Apache Iceberg

2025 Reflections, Google Antigravity, NotebookLM, Dremio AI Agent, Pangolin Catalog, Dremioframe & Iceframe Python Libraries for Apache Iceberg

Understanding the role of MCP, Langchain and Agent2Agent
