The AI Practitioner Podcast

by Lina Faik
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  • TECHNOLOGY
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Real-world AI, explained simply — with code, use cases, and zero fluff. aipractitioner.substack.com

Episodes

  1. PODCAST — Score-Based Causal Discovery with LLMs

    5D AGO

    PODCAST — Score-Based Causal Discovery with LLMs

    Prefer reading instead? The full article is available here. The podcast is also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Subscribe to keep up with the latest drops. Constraint-based methods discover causal graphs by testing independences. Score-based methods take a different route. They treat causal discovery as a model selection problem, scoring candidate graphs and searching for the one that best balances fit and complexity. In this episode, we explore how score-based algorithms learn causal structure, why they hit the same identifiability ceiling as constraint-based methods, and how LLMs can be plugged into the search itself rather than just bolted on at the end. You’ll learn: * How score-based methods differ from constraint-based ones: why framing causal discovery as model selection changes both the search procedure and the kinds of errors the algorithm makes. * Where LLMs can intervene in score-based pipelines: the five integration points, from hard constraints to iterative agentic loops, and which ones are recoverable when the LLM is wrong. * How to pick the right algorithm and LLM integration strategy: comparing priors, post-hoc orientation, and score augmentation on the Adult Census Income dataset, and what each one is worth in practice. By the end, you’ll have a clear view of where score-based methods sit relative to constraint-based ones, and a practical map of how to combine statistical search with LLM-derived priors without letting the LLM override the data. If you’d rather read than listen, the full article (with diagrams, code examples, and implementation details) is available on Substack: 👉 Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe to The AI Practitioner to get future articles and podcasts delivered straight to your inbox. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aipractitioner.substack.com

    15 min
  2. PODCAST — LLMs in Causal Discovery: A Deep Dive into Constraint-Based Algorithms

    MAY 7

    PODCAST — LLMs in Causal Discovery: A Deep Dive into Constraint-Based Algorithms

    Prefer reading instead? The full article is available here. The podcast is also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Subscribe to keep up with the latest drops. Most ML models answer one question: what is likely to happen? The harder question is what will change if you intervene. That gap is where causal reasoning begins. In this episode, we explore how constraint-based algorithms learn causal structure directly from data, and how LLMs can step in to resolve what statistics alone cannot. You’ll learn: * How PC, FCI, and RFCI discover causal graphs using conditional independence tests, and what assumptions each one makes. * How to encode domain knowledge as hard constraints, so the algorithm stops producing edges that are statistically plausible but practically nonsensical. * How LLMs can review and refine the output graph, resolving ambiguous orientations with domain reasoning when the data runs out of signal. By the end, you’ll have a clear picture of a three-layer pipeline that combines statistical discovery, expert constraints, and LLM review into a coherent approach to causal graph learning. If you’d rather read than listen, the full article (with diagrams, code examples, and implementation details) is available on Substack: 👉 Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe to The AI Practitioner to get future articles and podcasts delivered straight to your inbox. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aipractitioner.substack.com

    12 min
  3. PODCAST — Building Claude Skills: A New Paradigm for Interacting with LLMs

    MAR 10

    PODCAST — Building Claude Skills: A New Paradigm for Interacting with LLMs

    Prefer reading instead? The full article is available here. The podcast is also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Subscribe to keep up with the latest drops. Large language models are powerful, but relying on prompts alone quickly becomes fragile and difficult to scale. As teams try to operationalize LLMs in real workflows, traditional documentation and ad-hoc prompting start to break down. In this episode, we explore a new paradigm introduced with Claude Skills: packaging workflows, instructions, and resources into reusable capabilities that LLMs can execute. You’ll learn: * Why traditional documentation is poorly suited for LLMs and why workflow-first instructions are more effective. * How Claude Skills structure tasks using a concise SKILL.md file that points to supporting files and scripts loaded on demand. * How teams can design and deploy skills to turn LLMs into reliable task executors rather than prompt-driven tools. By the end, you’ll understand how skills move us from prompt engineering to designing AI-native workflows. If you’d rather read than listen, the full article (with diagrams, code examples, and implementation details) is available on Substack: 👉 Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe to The AI Practitioner to get future articles and podcasts delivered straight to your inbox. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aipractitioner.substack.com

    6 min
  4. PODCAST — Understanding User Intent Through AI Bot Traffic: A Practical Framework

    MAR 5

    PODCAST — Understanding User Intent Through AI Bot Traffic: A Practical Framework

    Prefer reading instead? The full article is available here. The podcast is also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Subscribe to keep up with the latest drops. AI assistants are quietly reshaping how people discover products and documentation online. But most analytics systems treat AI bot traffic as noise, filtering it out instead of learning from it. In this episode/article, we explore how to uncover real user intent hidden inside AI assistant traffic and turn bot logs into actionable insights for product and SEO teams. You’ll learn: * Why AI assistant traffic is fundamentally different from traditional bot traffic, and why filtering it out creates a major blind spot in modern analytics * How prompts sent to tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity translate into bot visits, and what these patterns reveal about real user questions, product research, and integration needs * A practical framework for analyzing AI bot logs, helping teams extract user intent signals that can inform documentation improvements, product decisions, and SEO strategy If you’d rather read than listen, the full article (with diagrams, code examples, and implementation details) is available on Substack: 👉 Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe to The AI Practitioner to get future articles and podcasts delivered straight to your inbox. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aipractitioner.substack.com

    6 min
  5. PODCAST — Long-Term Memory: Unlocking Smarter, Scalable AI Agents

    FEB 10

    PODCAST — Long-Term Memory: Unlocking Smarter, Scalable AI Agents

    Prefer reading instead? The full article is available here. The podcast is also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Subscribe to keep up with the latest drops. Most agent systems reason well in the moment but fail to improve over time because they forget everything once execution ends. In this episode, we explore how to design long-term memory for LangGraph agents, moving beyond short-term context toward durable, structured memory that remains transparent and controllable. You’ll learn: * Why long-term memory is an architectural problem, not a prompt-engineering trick, and how different memory types (working, semantic, episodic, procedural) interact in agent systems * What LangGraph provides out of the box for memory management—and where it stops, especially when building agents that must persist, update, and reason over memory across sessions * How to implement schema-driven long-term memory with Trustcall, enabling safe extraction, controlled updates, and debuggable memory writes inside LangGraph nodes If you’d rather read than listen, the full article (with diagrams, code examples, and implementation details) is available on Substack: 👉 Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe to The AI Practitioner to get future articles and podcasts delivered straight to your inbox. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aipractitioner.substack.com

    6 min
  6. PODCAST — Scaling LangGraph Agents: Parallelization, Subgraphs, and Map-Reduce Trade-Offs

    11/27/2025

    PODCAST — Scaling LangGraph Agents: Parallelization, Subgraphs, and Map-Reduce Trade-Offs

    Prefer reading instead? The full article is available here. The podcast is also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Subscribe to keep up with the latest drops. Agent systems break down when simple workflows evolve into tangled 30+ node graphs with unclear dependencies and sequential bottlenecks. In this episode, we explore how to scale LangGraph architectures through strategic parallelization, modular subgraphs, and dynamic task distribution. You’ll learn: * When to use parallel execution vs. sequential flows and how to manage concurrent state updates with reducers? * How to structure multi-agent systems using subgraphs with either shared or isolated states? * When dynamic map-reduce patterns outperform static parallelization for variable workloads If you’d rather read than listen, the full article (with diagrams, code examples, and implementation details) is available on Substack: 👉 Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe to The AI Practitioner to get future articles and podcasts delivered straight to your inbox. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aipractitioner.substack.com

    8 min

  7. 11/20/2025

    PODCAST — Human-in-the-Loop Agents: Steering AI with LangGraph’s Streaming, Breakpoints (Part 3)

    Prefer reading instead? The full article is available here. The podcast is also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Subscribe to keep up with the latest drops. Autonomous agents promise efficiency, but without visibility and control, they risk costly mistakes before anyone can intervene. In this episode, we explore how to transform AI agents from opaque black boxes into steerable, inspectable systems using LangGraph’s human-in-the-loop capabilities. You’ll learn: * How streaming exposes an agent’s reasoning in real-time, from token generation to state transitions, building trust through transparency * How breakpoints enable surgical intervention at critical decision points, allowing humans to approve, reject, or correct actions mid-execution * How time travel lets you rewind to any prior state, fork alternative reasoning paths, and explore “what-if” scenarios without restarting from scratch If you’d rather read than listen, the full article (with diagrams, code examples, and implementation details) is available on Substack: 👉 Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe to The AI Practitioner to get future articles and podcasts delivered straight to your inbox. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aipractitioner.substack.com

    8 min

  8. 11/06/2025

    PODCAST — Beyond the Demo: Building AI Agents Remember, Recover, and Scale (Part 2)

    Prefer reading instead? The full article is available here. Demo agents are easy to build, until they crash mid-execution, lose conversation context, or explode your token budget. In this episode, we explore the three critical mechanisms that transform fragile prototypes into production-grade AI systems. You’ll learn: * How to optimize state with reducers and caching — managing growing state efficiently through composable update functions and skipping expensive recomputation through intelligent caching strategies. * How to implement persistence and memory — maintaining state across sessions, preserving conversation history, and ensuring agents remember what they’ve already done to avoid redundant work * How to build fault-tolerant systems with checkpointers — saving state at every step, resuming execution from any point, and recovering gracefully from failures without losing progress If you’d rather read than listen, the full article (with code examples, implementation patterns, and debugging strategies) is available on Substack: 👉 Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe to The AI Practitioner to get future articles and podcasts delivered straight to your inbox. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aipractitioner.substack.com

    6 min

  9. 10/28/2025

    PODCAST — From Chains to Graphs: Smarter and Safer Agentic Systems with LangGraph (Part 1)

    Prefer reading instead? The full article is available here. The podcast is also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Subscribe to keep up with the latest drops. Linear AI chains fail the moment reality gets messy: when APIs break, reasoning loops infinitely, or context is lost between steps. In this episode, we dive into how LangGraph reimagines agent design with stateful, graph-based reasoning that mirrors how scientists actually think. You’ll learn: * Why linear chains can’t handle non-linear thought or adaptive reasoning * How graph-based agents recover from failures using state, loops, and conditional logic * How LangGraph Studio and LangSmith provide full observability—from local debugging to production monitoring If you’d rather read than listen, the full article (with diagrams, code examples, and implementation details) is available on Substack: 👉 Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe to The AI Practitioner to get future articles and podcasts delivered straight to your inbox. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aipractitioner.substack.com

    8 min

  10. 10/07/2025

    PODCAST — AgentOps: Operational Frameworks for LLM-Powered Agent Systems

    Prefer reading instead? The full article is available here. The podcast is also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Subscribe to keep up with the latest drops. Real-world AI agents fail differently than traditional software, silently, with confident hallucinations instead of error codes. In this episode, we explore how AgentOps adapts DevOps principles to handle the unique challenges of LLM-powered systems. You’ll learn: * Why agent systems require fundamentally different operations than traditional ML models * How the AgentOps lifecycle handles probabilistic reasoning and semantic failures * How to implement production-grade observability using MLflow’s tracing, prompt management, and evaluation capabilities If you’d rather read than listen, the full article (with code, implementation details, and comprehensive examples) is available on Substack: 👉 Like this kind of content? Subscribe to get future articles and episodes delivered straight to your inbox as soon as they’re published. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aipractitioner.substack.com

    10 min

  11. 07/31/2025

    PODCAST — Balancing Conflicting Goals: A Practical Guide to Multi-Objective Optimization with Pymoo

    Prefer reading instead? The full article is available here. The podcast is also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Subscribe to keep up with the latest drops. Real-world decisions often involve conflicting objectives, like boosting sales while avoiding overstock. In this episode, we explore how multi-objective optimization (using NSGA-II with the pymoo library) can model and solve such dilemmas. You'll learn: * Why traditional dispatch strategies fall short * How Pareto fronts reveal optimal trade-offs * How to apply ASF and Pseudo-Weights to guide final decisions If you’d rather read than listen, the full article (with code, charts, and detailed examples) is available on Substack : 👉 Like this kind of content? Subscribe to get future articles and episodes delivered straight to your inbox as soon as they’re published. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aipractitioner.substack.com

    7 min
  • 11 Episodes

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Real-world AI, explained simply — with code, use cases, and zero fluff. aipractitioner.substack.com

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