AI & Agents
13articles
Notes on designing and shipping AI agents on the Microsoft stack — choosing the right model, grounding on trustworthy data, wiring up MCP servers, and keeping everything secure by default.
- Agent design patterns and model selection
- Grounding, tools, and MCP servers
- Security, identity, and least privilege for AI
Articles about AI & Agents
Newest first
- 12 min readGitHub Copilot
I Had 27 MCP Servers and Four Doing the Same Job. So I Built AI Harness Helper
AI Harness Helper brings your coding tool settings into one view, finds duplicate MCP servers, and estimates how much context your instruction files use.
- 6 min readGitHub Copilot
Managing GitHub Copilot Credit Consumption
Manage GitHub Copilot credit consumption with usage reports, monthly budgets, focused prompts, model choices, and session limits that preserve quality.
- 8 min readCopilot Studio
Estimating Copilot Studio Costs: A FinOps Playbook
Estimate Copilot Studio agent costs from business tasks, measure cost per successful outcome, and refine production budgets with observed credit consumption.
- 49 min readAzure
An Hour with Azure SRE Agent
What Azure SRE Agent is, what setup actually looks like, and what happened when I pointed it at my own repo, my Application Insights telemetry across Dataverse, Copilot Studio, and Foundry, and then asked it for a health check on everything at once. Plus what connecting an incident platform buys you — autonomous mitigation, a verification loop, and a handoff straight to the GitHub Copilot coding agent — the five switches worth flipping that you don't get turned on by default, and what the newly published Zero Ops framework recommends, including the two governance layers above per-tool Allow and Ask and three details worth verifying against the current docs.
- 9 min readPower Platform
Power Apps Code Apps: Your Code, Power Platform's Guardrails
Code apps let you build a React or Vue app in your own IDE and run it on Power Platform, with Entra ID sign-in, 1,400+ connectors, and DLP handled for you.
- 12 min readCopilot Studio
Finding GitHub Copilot Harness Agents Before PPAC Shows Them
The Power Platform admin center still doesn't flag which Copilot Studio agents run on the GitHub Copilot harness. The isCLIAgent property does, and Microsoft has now published governance guidance built on it.
- 12 min readGitHub Copilot
Customizing GitHub Copilot: A Quickstart for the Best Experience
A 20-minute quickstart for customizing the GitHub Copilot app as a non-coder: instructions, agent skills, MCP servers, custom agents, and plugins.
- 9 min readMicrosoft Foundry
Microsoft Foundry Canvas: A Visual Front End for Agent Code
Foundry Canvas puts model selection, toolboxes, guardrails, testing, and deployment in a Copilot side panel while leaving you the actual agent code.
- 14 min readMicrosoft Foundry
Publish Foundry Agents to Teams Behind a Private Endpoint
Disabling public network access removes the Foundry portal's Teams publish button. Here's the REST path that replaces it and the inbound design you now own.
- 12 min readVibe Coding
The Vibe-Coding/Engineering Stack I Actually Ship With
The AI tools I use to design, ground, review, and ship vibe-coded projects, from Impeccable and Microsoft Foundry to MCPs and Power Platform Skills.
- 5 min readCopilot Studio
The Copilot Studio Auth Trap: Turning On SSO Changes Your Client
Turning on authentication breaks the Copilot Studio SDK with EnvironmentSettingViolation. Here's why Direct Line and a server-side token exchange are the fix.
- 37 min readVibe Coding
Vibe Coding 99-101 for non-coders
Set up GitHub Copilot to vibe code a blog, an app, or your own project. Learn the tools, agents, and skills; install Astro only for the blog example.
- 13 min readVibe Coding
Coding with AI: A Neurodivergent Non-Coder's Guide to Building Real Apps
Field-tested lessons from shipping with AI: use plan mode, build reusable skills, choose models deliberately, and keep a reviewer in the loop.