Blog

Deep technical articles and analysis.

AI & Agent

The Real Showdown After the Source Leak: Claude Code vs OpenClaw, 510K Lines vs 530K Lines

In our [previous article](https://zmead.com/blog/openclaw-vs-claude-code-design-philosophy), we dissected OpenClaw's 450K lines of open-source code alongside the 183 Markdown config files in Claude Code's public repository. We knew at the time that Claude Code's core runtime was closed-source — all we could analyze was the plugin ecosystem's definition layer. On March 31, 2026, security researcher Chaofan Shou discovered a 60MB `cli.js.map` file buried inside Claude Code v2.1.88's npm package — 1,884 TypeScript source files, 512,664 lines of code, fully exposed. This time, we finally get to crack open Claude Code's real engine and do a truly apples-to-apples source code comparison.

Cloud Architecture 18 min

Complete Failed Request Logging and Async Replay with CloudFront and Lambda@Edge

A dual Lambda@Edge architecture for recording full request headers and body of failed requests — WAF blocks and origin errors — without modifying origin code, with async replay from S3.

AI & Agent 8 min

WeChat Meets OpenClaw: What One CLI Command Tells Us About Platform Strategy in the AI Agent Era

WeChat's native integration with OpenClaw signals a major shift in platform strategy. Here's why the world's largest messaging app opening up to AI agents matters.

Cloud Architecture 12 min

5 Pitfalls of Logging Failed Requests with CloudFront + Lambda@Edge

How we built a dual Lambda@Edge solution to capture full request headers and body for failed CloudFront requests — and the 5 pitfalls we hit along the way.

Tech Deep Dive 25 min

How AI Coding Agents Actually Work: A Source Code Deep Dive

From LLM reasoning and tool calling to context window management and security models — a comprehensive look at the internals of AI coding agents, based on Amazon Q CLI and Claude Code source code.

Coding Tools 18 min

Building an Enterprise Agentic AI Platform with Kiro and AWS

How we built a delivery-focused AI agent platform using Kiro IDE, Strands Agents, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, and AWS CDK — in one week, with zero hand-written code.

Tech Deep Dive 15 min

OpenClaw vs Claude Code: How a Weekend Project With 310K Stars Is Reshaping AI Agents

A comprehensive analysis of OpenClaw and Claude Code — two AI agent products with radically different philosophies, architectures, and paths to adoption.

Tech Deep Dive 20 min

Source Code Deep Dive: OpenClaw vs Claude Code — Two Radically Different AI Agent Architectures

A source-code-level comparison of how OpenClaw (453K lines TypeScript) and Claude Code (28K lines Markdown) approach agent definition, plugin systems, multi-model support, and security.

Cloud Architecture 12 min

Building Real-Time Audio-Video AI Interaction with Amazon Nova and TEN Framework

How to build a low-latency, multimodal real-time audio-video AI assistant using Amazon Nova, Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Polly, and the open-source TEN framework on AWS.

Coding Tools 12 min

One Year with AI Coding Tools: From Copilot to Claude Code — A Practitioner's Honest Assessment

After a year of daily AI-assisted development across Cursor, Claude Code, Cline, and Amazon Q — what actually works, what doesn't, and how AI coding tools are reshaping the developer landscape.

Cloud Architecture 15 min

From Database to Natural Language Queries: Amazon QuickSuite End-to-End Data Analysis

A step-by-step guide to connecting databases, building dashboards, creating Topics for natural language Q&A, and setting up collaborative Spaces in Amazon QuickSuite.

AI & Agent 15 min

AI Agents for Advertising: A Practical Guide to Creative Asset Generation

How to build an AI agent system using Strands Agents SDK and Amazon Bedrock to automate advertising creative generation — from copywriting to image and video production.

AI & Agent 18 min

Building a RAG System from Scratch: A Hands-On Guide with LangChain and Elasticsearch

Step-by-step tutorial on building a Retrieval Augmented Generation system using LangChain, Elasticsearch vector search, and AWS Bedrock — from document embedding to context-enhanced generation.

Coding Tools 15 min

Building an AI-Powered Video Course Generator: From PPT to Production

How to build an automated video course creation tool using AI — covering PPT text extraction, LLM script generation, text-to-speech synthesis, and FFmpeg video composition.

Tech Deep Dive 20 min

Designing a Full-Site Search Engine with Elasticsearch: From Architecture to Implementation

A comprehensive guide to building enterprise search with Elasticsearch — covering multi-source indexing, binlog-based CDC sync, permission-aware retrieval, hot keyword ranking with time decay, and typeahead suggestions.

Tech Deep Dive 16 min

Building a Knowledge Base Search Engine with FSCrawler and Elasticsearch

How to use FSCrawler to index PDF, Word, Excel, and scanned documents into Elasticsearch — covering OCR setup, custom mappings, REST API integration, and production deployment.

Tech Deep Dive 15 min

Adding a Unique Index to a 15-Million-Row MySQL Table: A Production War Story

How we added a unique index to a live 15M-row table with duplicate data — the mistakes we made, the outage we caused, and the modern tools (pt-osc, gh-ost, online DDL) we should have used.

Cloud Architecture 20 min

DNS from First Principles to Kubernetes: A Practitioner's Deep Dive

From dig traces and DNS hierarchy to CoreDNS configuration in Kubernetes — a comprehensive guide to understanding and debugging DNS in containerized environments.

Cloud Architecture 15 min

Building a Distributed Job Scheduler in Go: From Design to Production

A practical guide to building a distributed task scheduling system in Go using Machinery, Redis, and cron — covering task management, distributed locking, retry strategies, and monitoring.

Cloud Architecture 18 min

Building an API Monitoring Dashboard with Grafana and Elasticsearch

A practical guide to building production API monitoring — from Elasticsearch data source setup and Lucene queries to Grafana dashboard panels, alerting rules, and operational best practices.