In my previous article, I argued that agentic development needs enough specification to make correctness checkable. A quick prompt can get implementation started quickly, but someone still has to decide whether the result does what we wanted. I left a fairly practical question unanswered, though. On...
I use AI for writing all the time. But not because it’s good at writing. In fact, just the opposite is true. AI is so reliably bad at writing that I’ve actually taken advantage of that, and made its bad writing an integral part of my writing process. I’ve written a lot of books and […]
On a recent episode of This Week in AI, we discussed that the number of nonhumans on the internet is greater than humans, 144 to 1. It’s an estimate, and the order of magnitude is more important than the number itself. What matters is what a ratio anywhere in that range does to a security […]
The Preservation Gap in the AI Stack: Why Capability Is Advancing Faster Than Reconstructability
Artificial intelligence systems are difficult to reproduce because their behavior depends on nondeterministic models and on data, configurations, policies, and external services that continue to change. But exact reproducibility is not always what operators, investigators, or auditors need. They oft...
How to Build Reliable AI Agent Systems for Production
The following article was originally published on the Agentic AI Foundation blog site and is being republished here with the author’s permission. A customer asks your company’s AI agent to update the shipping address on account 123. The agent relies on a support ticket with a typo and updates accoun...
Evaluating AI-Generated Frontend Code: What Should We Actually Test?
AI can now generate a surprising amount of frontend code from a short description. A developer can ask for a form, a table, a modal, a settings page, or a dashboard view and get something that looks usable almost immediately. It may compile, render, and even arrive with a few tests. That is useful, ...
I’ve known Jesse Vincent for more than 20 years, since the days when I was still editing and publishing Perl books and organizing the Perl Conference and he was the chief maintainer of Perl 5 and the project manager for Perl 6. We’d lost touch, but he rocketed back into my consciousness last October...
This post isn’t about OpenAI’s use of AI to solve the Navier-Stokes problem, one of the Millennium Prize problems, at least not directly. I’m not a mathematician; I have a vague understanding of the problem and certainly no understanding of the proof. But the discussion surrounding the solution crys...
The following article originally appeared on Venkatesh Rao’s Substack, Contraptions, and is being republished here with the author’s permission. The sole athletic achievement of my life came in 1993: winning the IIT Bombay freshman 50m freestyle race with a time of 41s. That got me into the college ...
This is the third post in a four-part series about post-training. If you missed them, read part 1 and part 2. The final post, on implementing your own pipeline, will be coming October 7. Now that you understand the gist of reinforcement learning and supervised fine-tuning, it’s time to explore what ...
When considering the history of AI, Richard Sutton observed that brute force and compute scale has always trumped human expertise, and when you look for it, you can see this “bitter lesson” play out throughout tech history. In his keynote at Ai4 2026, Tim O’Reilly explains why grappling with the bit...
The following article originally appeared on Addy Osmani’s blog and is being republished here with the author’s permission. A software factory harnesses loops at scale. You can run the loop with humans in it (light factory), trading judgment and concentration against speed and breakage. Or you can i...
Every knowledge program seems to begin with the same request. A senior engineer is leaving in six weeks, and someone asks her to document the process she’s carried for years. She returns a clean flowchart of the happy path. The drawing is accurate and may even be elegant. It leaves out the threshold...
Beyond Navier–Stokes: Who Controls Scientific Discovery?
Is the current furore in mathematics the canary in the coalmine for experimental science and knowledge work? This post was originally published in Vanishing Gradients on September 11, 2026. It’s been updated to address the subsequent declaration by 25 Fields Medalists and the debate about AI, mathem...
There is more technical content available today than any human being could read in a thousand lifetimes. Every topic has a dozen YouTube videos, three Substack posts, a GitHub repo, and a Reddit thread, most created in the last six months and, in many cases, technically accurate. And yet most of the...
Sometime in the next few months, Anthropic is supposed to send me a check. Around $9,000 for me, about the same for my longtime coauthor Jenny Greene, and roughly $18,000 for O’Reilly, our publisher. The reason is that pirated copies of the books Jenny and I wrote, along with a huge amount of other ...
Consider a composite of a failure pattern that’s becoming increasingly common on teams that have scaled AI-assisted development past a handful of enthusiasts. A staff engineer named Priya opens a pull request. The PR is 340 lines and adds an endpoint that writes to the customer table directly, bypas...
The following article originally appeared on Tim O’Brien’s Medium blog and is being republished here with the author’s permission. AI costs are easy to count and hard to understand, and judging effort by a token volume? While that might feel like a valid measure of value or complexity, it doesn’t ca...
A lot of professional writers say they never do it. And for writers who do, the consequences can be serious. Book contracts have been withdrawn. People have lost jobs. I have a contrarian view. I say AI is a medium, like painting, sculpture, photography, music, or language itself. If AI is a medium,...
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...