Patterns
5articles in this topic.
Binary search is everywhere once you see it
Binary search is not a data structure trick — it is a way of thinking about any monotonic question, and once you internalize it, you see it lurking inside problems that look nothing like sorted arrays.
GroupBy is a three-act play: split, apply, combine
The split-apply-combine model is the single mental frame that makes Pandas GroupBy, SQL GROUP BY, and every variant of agg/transform/filter finally cohere.
Hash tables: O(1) until they don't
A hash table promises constant-time lookup in the average case — but that asterisk hides a story about collisions, load factors, and adversarial keys that every practitioner should understand.
Two pointers: the trick that turns O(n squared) into O(n)
Most array pair problems feel like they need a nested loop until you notice that sorting gives you a monotonic structure you can exploit to skip the entire inner loop.
The five patterns that ship real agents in 2026
Anthropic's December 2024 paper became the production reference for agent design. Two years on, here's which patterns actually survived contact with shipped products — and why the simple ones won.