Phi-4 Benchmark Results vs Larger Models

Phi-4’s benchmark results surprised many observers when Microsoft released them in late 2024: a 14B parameter model outperforming models of 30B, 70B, and in some cases even larger on reasoning-heavy tasks. Understanding these results — what the benchmarks actually measure, why Phi-4 does well on them, where it falls short, and what the numbers mean … Read more

Phi-4 Mini vs Phi-4: Which Should You Use?

Microsoft released Phi-4 and Phi-4-mini as part of its Phi series of high-efficiency small language models, with both positioned as the state of the art in their respective size classes. Phi-4 (14B parameters) competes with models 2–3x its size; Phi-4-mini (3.8B) competes with models in the 7–8B range. Choosing between them is not simply a … Read more

How to Build an AI Agent That Writes Code

An AI agent that writes code autonomously — reading requirements, generating implementations, running tests, and iterating on failures — is one of the most practically valuable agent applications for software teams. Unlike a simple code generation prompt, a coding agent closes the feedback loop: it sees whether the code it wrote actually works, reads the … Read more

How to Build a ReAct Agent from Scratch

The ReAct pattern — short for Reasoning and Acting — is one of the most influential agent architectures in practical AI development. Published in a 2022 paper by Yao et al., it describes a simple but powerful idea: interleave the model’s reasoning steps with its action steps, making both visible and traceable. Rather than having … Read more

AutoGen v0.4 Getting Started Guide

AutoGen v0.4 represents a significant rearchitecture of Microsoft’s multi-agent framework, shifting from the monolithic agent classes of earlier versions to a more modular, event-driven design built around the Actor model. If you have used AutoGen v0.2 or v0.3, v0.4 will feel substantially different — the concepts carry over but the API and the mental model … Read more

Best Small Language Models Under 3B Parameters

The sub-3B parameter range has become one of the most competitive and practically useful tiers in the small language model landscape. Models in this range run comfortably on CPU, fit on smartphones and edge devices, and are cheap to fine-tune on consumer hardware — while delivering quality that would have required a 13B+ model just … Read more

Small Language Models Explained 2026

Small language models — typically defined as models with fewer than 7 billion parameters — have become one of the most practically significant areas of AI development in 2025–2026. While headlines focus on ever-larger frontier models, the rapid improvement in smaller models has quietly made high-quality AI capability available on laptops, smartphones, edge devices, and … Read more

How to Use MCP with VS Code

VS Code added native MCP server support in version 1.99 (April 2025), bringing the same external tool connectivity that Cursor and Claude Desktop offer to the world’s most widely used code editor. With MCP in VS Code, GitHub Copilot’s chat can query your database while you write queries, fetch GitHub issues while you implement features, … Read more

How to Deploy a PyTorch Model with TorchServe

TorchServe is PyTorch’s official model serving framework, designed to take a trained PyTorch model from a .pt or .pth file to a production HTTP endpoint with minimal configuration. It handles the serving infrastructure — request batching, multi-model management, logging, metrics, and health checks — so you can focus on your model and handler logic rather … Read more