Tag: comparison

Use FutureBuilder or StreamBuilder for a self-contained, throwaway async widget. Reach for Riverpod AsyncValue once the result is shared, cached, or mutated. Here is the decision, the gotchas, and runnable code for both. Tested on Flutter 3.44 and flutter_riverpod 3.3.1.

Use the built-in source-generated validation for synchronous, attribute-expressible rules in ASP.NET Core 11; reach for FluentValidation when you need async rules, complex cross-field logic, or validation kept out of your domain models.

Default to HybridCache for new caching code in .NET 11. Reach for IMemoryCache only when you need raw single-server speed with no serialization, and IDistributedCache only as a backing store. Here is the decision matrix.

Use Quartz.NET when an LLM job must run on a real cron and never overlap itself, Hangfire when each run must survive a restart and retry on rate limits, and a plain BackgroundService only for a loose in-process loop. A decision matrix with the cron and concurrency gotchas that pick for you.

Rule-based checks are your floor and they are non-negotiable; LLM-as-judge is the ceiling you add when code quality, not just correctness, is what you ship. Here is the decision, with cost, latency, and the SWE-bench gap that proves why.

Claude subagents give you orchestration-level parallelism out of the box: one agent spawns isolated sub-contexts that run concurrently. OpenAI Assistants never had that, and it shuts down August 26, 2026, so new parallel work belongs on the Responses API plus your own fan-out. Here is how the two models actually differ and which to reach for.

For a new .NET agent in 2026, start on Microsoft Agent Framework 1.0. Semantic Kernel is in maintenance mode. Here is the side-by-side and the one case where SK still wins.

All three hit 1.0. Pick Microsoft Agent Framework if you live in Azure and .NET, LangChain/LangGraph for vendor-neutral graph orchestration, LlamaIndex for retrieval-grounded agents.

A decision guide and real benchmark for EF Core 11: use ExecuteUpdate for set-based writes by a predicate, and the load-then-SaveChanges path only when you need the change tracker, interceptors, or a complex object graph.

Use custom tool calling for one app you own end to end, MCP for any integration you want reused across Claude Code, Cursor, and ChatGPT, and OpenAPI plugins only as a bridge when you already have a spec. MCP is the cross-client standard in 2026; plugins are legacy.