The following article originally appeared on the Tech Policy Press site and is being republished here with the author’s permission. In Washington, AI is increasingly being treated as something that needs to be controlled. The government believes that AI is, first and foremost, a national security as...
What’s an Orchestrator—and Why Does Software Need One?
The following article originally appeared on Medium and is being republished here with the author’s permission. Everybody’s talking about the death of developers. I get it. The developer whose job was to write boilerplate or scaffold CRUD apps is done—a model can do that in seconds, and that develop...
The following article originally appeared on Addy Osmani’s blog site and is being republished here with the author’s permission. Technical debt lives in your code. Cognitive debt lives in your head. Intent debt lives in the artifacts you may never have written: the goals, constraints, and rationale ...
Drew Breunig is one of the smartest voices writing about AI today. He’s the CEO and co-founder of cmpnd.ai, and a long-time hacker with a depth of experience from several eras, which is a surprisingly valuable asset these days. He’s also got a book on the way, The Context Engineering Handbook, alrea...
Why “It Depends” Is the Most Future-Proof Phrase in Software
Ask an architect almost any question and you’ll get the same answer: It depends. For years this answer has been the punchline of jokes about architects, but in an era when AI can generate a working service faster than you can describe it, “it depends” is one of the most important phrases in software...
In 1995, the question in the media was whether Netscape or Microsoft would control the web. The answer, it turned out, was neither. Both Netscape and Microsoft aimed to dominate the web server and browser market, reasoning that whoever controlled both ends of the connection would have an internet “p...
We Keep Renaming AI Coding. Here’s What I’d Call It.
Boris Cherny, who runs Claude Code, told Business Insider in May that the phrase “vibe coding” had started to annoy him, and that he’d gone looking for a better one. He’s not the only one who’s annoyed. The term itself doesn’t actually annoy me, though. I think vibe coding is a really good name: It ...
For as long as we’ve taught programming, the student’s code has provided a window into the students’ thinking. Errors, the code structure, the awkward working solution—all of it showed how someone reasoned and where they got stuck. It was never a clean window. Students have always copied, crammed, a...
The following article originally appeared on Charity Majors’s Substack and is being reposted here with the author’s permission. A few days back I wrote a piece called “AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy.” I have notes on a whole pile of AI-related to...
I’ve been working on the Quality Playbook, my open source AI skill that uses quality engineering to find bugs that normal AI code review misses, and I recently had a batch of work that turned into a long run of point releases. I was using Claude Cowork as the orchestrator: planning scope, dispatchin...
The following article originally appeared on Addy Osmani’s blog and is being republished here with the author’s permission. I cowrote a Google whitepaper about how AI is changing the software lifecycle. I’m not going to summarize the whole thing. Instead, here are the handful of ideas in it I think ...
This week data and AI evangelist Christina Stathopoulos returned for a solo news briefing. Instead of exploring one or two topics in depth, Christina sorted the week’s headlines into a handful of threads: advances in physical hardware to keep up with AI demand, the widening reach of government overs...
AI Enthusiasts Are in a Race Against Time, AI Skeptics Are in a Race Against Entropy
The following article originally appeared on Charity Majors’s Substack and is being republished here with the author’s permission. I recently attended a talk where one of the presenters made some pretty…astonishing claims about what they had achieved by the pure, uncut power of vibe coding. Difficul...
The following article originally appeared on Markus Eisele’s newsletter, The Main Thread, and is being republished here with the author’s permission. There’s a mental model spreading through the developer community right now that goes something like this: Agents are smart enough to figure things out...
In the 1980s, Japan led the world in semiconductors, consumer electronics, and computer hardware, the industries everyone assumed would decide the next phase of economic power. Japan won them and still did not overtake the United States in the information revolution that followed. Jeff Ding, a polit...
This episode of This Week in AI arrived at a moment when the AI infrastructure most teams take for granted suddenly looked a lot less stable. Andreas Welsch, founder and chief human AI officer at Intelligence Briefing, was joined by Matt Palmer, head of developer experience at Conductor and develope...
The following article originally appeared on Medium and is being republished here with the author’s permission. As companies adopt AI tools, a lot of time is spent on thinking about AI policies from a security, compliance, or even cost-focused angle. But many leaders are neglecting to address how th...
The practice of tokenmaxxing appears to be dying out, even before I had a chance to write about it. Good riddance. Burning tokens to create the appearance of productivity was fated to last only until the accountants learned about it, and the strictest of all accountants is one’s personal checkbook. ...
The following article originally appeared on Addy Osmani’s blog site and is being republished here with the author’s permission. Coding agents are extraordinarily good now, and getting better fast. The interesting consequence is that the hard part of engineering moved from writing code to deciding w...
This Week in AI: The Next-Gen Recommendation Experience
This week Miguel Fierro, a former Microsoft principal researcher who recently founded his own company, RecoMind, joined data and AI evangelist Christina Stathopoulos to talk about the state of recommendation systems. Christina also ran through the latest AI news she’s been watching, from Anthropic’s...
On this week’s episode, host and the founder of AI advisory firm Intelligence Briefing Andreas Welsch brought together Maya Mikhailov, cofounder and CEO of Savvi AI, and Doug Shannon, generative AI and intelligent automation leader, to cover a handful of interconnected topics that practitioners are ...
DJ Patil has spent the past several months on a listening tour. Wherever he travels, he finds a local university, pings faculty and students and anyone else who wants to show up, and runs an AMA. He’s heard from grad students who can’t get callbacks, hospital administrators dealing with federal poli...
AI Sovereignty and the Architecture of Participation
Adam Tooze recently shared a piece from The Economist about Brazil’s push for what it calls “medical sovereignty,” the determination to make its own vaccines and the active ingredients that go into its medicines rather than depend on supply chains it doesn’t control. Brazil already produces a large ...
Why Doesn’t Anyone Teach Developers About Context Management?
This is the sixth article in a series on agentic engineering and AI-driven development. Read part one here, part two here, part three here, part four here, and part five here. I think context management is one of the most important skills in AI-driven development, and it’s weird that compared to oth...