Outpost by Ranger

Technical writing from the Ranger engineering team.

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  • Scatterplot comparing time versus tokens: MCP uses more tokens but finishes faster, while CLI and agent-browser use fewer tokens but take longer.
    April 3, 2026  · Mikayla Thompson

    The Hidden Cost of Fewer Tokens: Why context efficiency makes the Playwright CLI slower

    We wanted to know whether the Playwright CLI would make our tooling more context efficient, faster, and cheaper. The results were decidedly mixed.

  • When a Test Fails: Solving Automated Triage
    March 31, 2026  · Jon Hieb

    When a Test Fails: Solving Automated Triage

    Building agents for complex problems — how we improved our Triage agent's accuracy by 400% through better evaluation, better questions, and understanding how agents think.

  • Product Drift
    March 18, 2026  · Josh Ip

    Product Drift

    Agents can generate features faster than you can read them. The product doesn't just move forward — it starts to drift.

  • Diagram showing the architecture of Ranger's background agent infrastructure from Slack to deployed preview environments
    February 20, 2026  · Daniel Griffin

    Why You're Overthinking Background Agents

    If you can run your system locally on your machine, you can have background agents that anyone at your company can use to ship features from Slack. That's really the bar.

  • Illustration of Ranger's QA agent verifying a background coding agent's work in a browser
    February 19, 2026  · Adwith Mukherjee, Chris Sheafe, Josh Ip, Mikayla Thompson

    Why We Built a QA Agent for Our Background Agent

    Our background agent writes the code like any other coding agent, but can now use Ranger to close the loop by testing itself and showcasing its work back to us for review.

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