What is AI engineering and what do AI engineers even do?
From ConTejas Code by Tejas Kumar
February 23, 2026 · 1h 56m
About this episode
This episode breaks down the realities of AI engineering in 2026, focusing on production challenges and the evolving role of AI engineers.
Links - CodeCrafters (Sponsor): https://tej.as/codecrafters - The Rise of the AI Engineer (Latent Space): https://www.latentspace.com/p/ai-engineer - Anthropic Model Context Protocol (MCP): https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-context-protocol Anthropic Skills (SKILL.md): https://resources.anthropic.com/hubfs/The-Complete-Guide-to-Building-Skill-for-Claude.pdf?hsLang=en - Pratim Bhosale on Vector Search (Previous Episode): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJcrI1GbDec - OpenClaw (Official Repository): https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw - WormGPT/Prompt Injection Incident (The Verge Reference): https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/881574/cline-openclaw-prompt-injection-hack Summary In this episode, I’m finally breaking down what AI Engineering actually looks like in 2026. We’ve moved past the "wow" phase of demos into the hard reality of production, where models lie, costs spike, and security is a nightmare. I define the role formally—separating it from ML engineering—and dive deep into the three core problems we solve daily: hallucinations, real-time knowledge, and context engineering. I also explore the explosion of agent runtimes, specifically dissecting OpenClaw…
People in this episode
Host: Tejas Kumar
Topics covered
- AI engineering
- production challenges
- model context
- agent runtimes
- security in AI
Keywords
- AI engineering
- hallucinations
- real-time knowledge
- context engineering
- multi-agent concurrency
Sponsors
CodeCrafters
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Latent Space, Anthropic, OpenClaw, The Verge
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