RXed AI News

Your AI intelligence briefing

Learn AI — one element at a time

The 20 elements of the RXed AI Periodic Table, explained in plain language for people who run a business, not a lab: what it is, when you actually need it, and which audited tools do it well.

Prompts: the instructions everything else obeys
What prompt engineering still means in 2026, why the system/user split saves real money, and how to spot tools that hide the instruction layer from you.
Embeddings: how AI finds meaning in your files
Meaning as numbers: the trick behind semantic search and every chat-with-your-documents tool — and why it costs almost nothing.
Context: the working memory you have to manage
Why bigger context windows didn't kill context engineering, and how deciding what the model sees cuts cost and improves answers at once.
Tracing: the flight recorder your AI needs
Agents fail politely — well-formed, confident and wrong. Traces are how you find out why, and only ~15% of deployments have them.
The LLM: choosing the engine (it's a buyer's market)
Match the model class to the job, not the marketing — and fear the switching cost of everything around the model, not the model itself.
Function calling: how AI stops talking and starts doing
The structured-action loop behind every agent that books, files or sends anything — and where MCP fits next to it.
Vector stores: where meaning gets indexed
Probably you just need pgvector: the boring 2026 consensus on storing embeddings, and the export trap to avoid.
RAG: making AI answer from your knowledge, not its guesses
The retrieval pattern behind every serious knowledge assistant — why chunking beats model choice, and the three questions that expose weak RAG.