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SL#86 - Your Agent Reads 150,000 Tokens Before It Reads Your Request

The "MCP is bloated, rip it out" crowd is right about the bill and wrong about the cause. The token tax isn't the protocol. It's a convention nobody questioned: dumping every tool definition into the model's context.

Houssem BEN SLAMA

design_patterns

Jun 27, 2026

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6 min read

SL#85 - Layered Architecture: The Default That Works

Every greenfield service drifts into controller, service, repository. People call it boring three-tier and reach for something fancier. The boredom is the feature.

Houssem BEN SLAMA

AWS

Jun 27, 2026

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9 min read

SL#84 - AWS AI Series (21/30) - Build an Iceberg Lakehouse on S3 Tables: Time Travel and Auto-Compaction, Queried From Two Engines

Stand up a managed Apache Iceberg table on Amazon S3 Tables, then query it from both Athena SQL and Spark, travel back to an earlier version, and watch S3 compact the files for you with zero maintenance jobs.

Houssem BEN SLAMA

AWS

Jun 26, 2026

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9 min read

SL#83 - AWS AI Series (20/30) - From S3 to Insights in Under an Hour with SageMaker Unified Studio Serverless Notebooks

Stage your own data in S3, onboard into SageMaker Unified Studio with one click, then query it three ways in a single serverless notebook: Athena SQL, Athena for Spark, and a natural-language Data Agent.

Houssem BEN SLAMA

AWS

Jun 25, 2026

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10 min read

SL#82 - AWS AI Series (19/30) - Build a Company Assistant Over S3 and Confluence With a Custom Action in Amazon Q Business

Build an Amazon Q Business application that indexes your S3 documents, connects to Confluence, and runs a custom plugin action that hits your own API. Plan for 2 hours if you have used IAM Identity Center before, 3 if you have not.

Houssem BEN SLAMA

design_patterns

Jun 24, 2026

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7 min read

SL#81 - MVC and Why Every Framework Reinvents It

The MVC your web framework ships is not the MVC that Trygve Reenskaug wrote down in 1979. What mutated and what survived tells you what the pattern was actually for, and why the Controller keeps falling apart.

Houssem BEN SLAMA

AWS

Jun 23, 2026

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8 min read

SL#80 - AWS AI Series (18/30) - Upgrade a Legacy Java 8 App to Java 21 With AWS Transform's Agentic CLI

Hand a legacy Java 8 Spring Boot app to an AWS agent and get back a Java 21 branch with a green build and a reviewable, commit-by-commit diff. About 60 to 90 minutes, most of it watching builds run.

Houssem BEN SLAMA

AWS_AI_Series

Jun 22, 2026

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8 min read

SL#79 - AWS AI Series (18/30) - Run a Guardrailed Autonomous Agent on a Real Repo with Kiro CLI

Build a checkpointed autonomous run: a Kiro CLI agent that refactors a real repo on its own, fenced by tool permissions and a one-command rollback. About 90 minutes.

Houssem BEN SLAMA

design_patterns

Jun 21, 2026

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6 min read

SL#78 - What Design Patterns Actually Are (and When to Ignore Them)

A design pattern is not reusable code. It's a name for a recurring shape that a good solution takes under pressure. Knowing the difference is what separates engineers who use patterns from engineers who get used by them.

Houssem BEN SLAMA

AWS

Jun 21, 2026

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9 min read

SL#77 - AWS AI Series (17/30) - Ship a Feature Through Kiro Specs With Property-Based Tests

Take one small, invariant-heavy feature, a fair money splitter, all the way through Kiro's spec workflow: EARS requirements, design, tasks, generated code, and a property-based test suite that actually tries to break it.

Houssem BEN SLAMA

Software Engineering

Jun 21, 2026

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7 min read

SL#76 - Code Review Was Never About Reading the Diff

AI made writing code almost free and left reviewing it exactly as expensive. The teams losing that trade are the ones who still think review is where bugs get caught.

Houssem BEN SLAMA

AWS

Jun 20, 2026

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8 min read

SL#75 - AWS AI Series (16/30) - Build and Ship Your Own MCP Server on AWS Lambda

Write a custom MCP server with three tools and session memory, deploy it to Lambda behind API Gateway with Streamable HTTP, verify it with the MCP Inspector, and connect it to Claude.

Houssem BEN SLAMA

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SL#86 - Your Agent Reads 150,000 Tokens Before It Reads Your Request

SL#85 - Layered Architecture: The Default That Works

SL#84 - AWS AI Series (21/30) - Build an Iceberg Lakehouse on S3 Tables: Time Travel and Auto-Compaction, Queried From Two Engines

SL#83 - AWS AI Series (20/30) - From S3 to Insights in Under an Hour with SageMaker Unified Studio Serverless Notebooks

SL#82 - AWS AI Series (19/30) - Build a Company Assistant Over S3 and Confluence With a Custom Action in Amazon Q Business

SL#81 - MVC and Why Every Framework Reinvents It

SL#80 - AWS AI Series (18/30) - Upgrade a Legacy Java 8 App to Java 21 With AWS Transform's Agentic CLI

SL#79 - AWS AI Series (18/30) - Run a Guardrailed Autonomous Agent on a Real Repo with Kiro CLI

SL#78 - What Design Patterns Actually Are (and When to Ignore Them)

SL#77 - AWS AI Series (17/30) - Ship a Feature Through Kiro Specs With Property-Based Tests

SL#76 - Code Review Was Never About Reading the Diff

SL#75 - AWS AI Series (16/30) - Build and Ship Your Own MCP Server on AWS Lambda

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