2025

Use streaming UIs and customers are willing to wait 5x longer

If you're not building your application with streaming in mind, you're making two major mistakes

1. You're going to have to spend months refactoring your code to adapt to streaming once you make this decision
2. You're missing out on a major opportunity to improve the user experience.

I've built a fair bit of user interaces that rely on streaming content with tools like the ai-sdk by vercel and I've found that there are three main considerations to think about when building out your application.

MCPs are really LLM microservices

Language Model applications have a fundamental problem: they need better ways to access tools and services. Developers currently spend hours coding custom integrations, maintaining authentication flows, and defining complex schemas for each external service. This creates bottlenecks that limit what AI systems can actually do for users.

Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCPs) offers a potential solution by providing a standardized way for LLMs to discover and use tools dynamically. Think of MCPs as an API specification for AI microservices - they define how AI systems can find, call, and combine different tools without requiring developers to hardcode every possible interaction.

In this article, I'll explore what makes MCPs promising, the challenges they solve, and what's still missing for them to move towards become production-ready. This largely serves as some of my own thoughts after chatting with people about them over the past week or so, I'd love to know if you think differently.

Why Structured Outputs matter for LLM Applications in 2025

I gave a short talk at NUS in January 2025 about structured outputs and how they enable faster iteration and testing when building language models. I've written up a more detailed version of the talk here as well as provided the slides below.

LLM applications in 2025 face a unique challenge: while they enable rapid deployment compared to traditional ML systems, they also introduce new risks around reliability and safety.

In this article, I'll explain why structured outputs remain crucial for building robust LLM applications, and how they enable faster iteration and testing.

Using Language Models to make sense of Chat Data without compromising user privacy

If you're interested in the code for this article, you can find it here where I've implemented a simplified version of CLIO without the PII classifier and most of the original prompts ( to some degree ).

Analysing chat data at scale is a challenging task for 3 main reasons

1. Privacy - Users don't want their data to be shared with others and we need to respect that. This makes it challenging to do analysis on user data that's specific
2. Explainability - Unsupervised clustering methods are sometimes difficult to interpret because we don't have a good way to understand what the clusters mean.
3. Scale - We need to be able to process large amounts of data efficiently.

An ideal solution allows us to understand broad general trends and patterns in user behaviour while preserving user privacy. In this article, we'll explore an approach that addresses this challenge - Claude Language Insights and Observability ( CLIO ) which was recently discussed in a research paper released by Anthropic.

We'll do so in 3 steps

1. We'll start by understanding on a high level how CLIO works
2. We'll then implement a simplified version of CLIO in Python
3. We'll then discuss some of the clusters that we generated and some of the limitations of such an approach

Let's walk through these concepts in detail.

How I Use Claude

I've been a heavy user of Claude for the past few months and anecdotally, ever since Sonnet 3.6, I've been using it more and more.

I was kind of curious to see how I use it on a day to day basis and so when I realised I could export my claude chat history, I thought I'd try to do some analysis on it.

I'll write a separate post on how I did the analysis but I thought I'd share some of the results here. Here is a guide on how to export your Claude chat history.

I was inspired by this post by Boretti Fernando and thought I'd try to do something similar.