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...
I just sat in a room full of data engineers the other week who were worrying about AI automating them out of work the same way auto manufacturing in Detroit was upended half a century ago. All AI. All the time. That’s what technology professionals are talking about. Data scientists, data engineers, ...
Steve Yegge’s article about programmer burnout (“The AI Vampire”) along with Margaret Storey’s article about Cognitive Debt started an ongoing conversation about programmer fatigue and software quality—two topics that should be linked, but often aren’t. Steve argues that programming constantly with ...
The Best Risk Mitigation Strategy in Data? A Single Source of Truth
Every data leader has a version of this story. A regulatory audit surfaces a metric that doesn’t match across systems. A board member catches conflicting revenue numbers in two reports presented back-to-back. An AI tool generates a recommendation based on data that hasn’t been governed since the ana...
This is the fifth article in a series on agentic engineering and AI-driven development. Read part one here, part two here, part three here, and part four here. I recently had a taste of humility with my AI-generated code. I live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and recently I needed to get to the other side...
Don’t Automate Your Moat: Matching AI Autonomy to Risk and Competitive Stakes
I was talking to a senior engineer at a well-funded company not long ago. I asked him to walk me through a critical algorithm at the heart of their product, something that ran hundreds of times a second and directly affected customer outcomes. He paused and said, “Honestly, I’m not totally sure how ...
We tend to assume that if every part of a system behaves correctly, the system itself will behave correctly. That assumption is deeply embedded in how we design, test, and operate software. If a service returns valid responses, if dependencies are reachable, and if constraints are satisfied, then th...
Enterprise AI governance still authorizes agents as if they were stable software artifacts.They are not. An enterprise deploys a LangChain-based research agent to analyze market trends and draft internal briefs. During preproduction review, the system behaves within acceptable bounds: It routes quer...
The following article was originally published on Tim O’Brien’s Medium page and is being reposted here with the author’s permission. If you’ve spent any time around AI-assisted software work, you already know the moment when the Scope Creep Kraken first puts a tentacle on the boat. The project begin...
I sat down with Aaron Levie at the O’Reilly AI Codecon two weeks ago. Aaron cofounded Box in 2005, and 20 years later, his company manages content for about two-thirds of the Fortune 500. Aaron is one of the few CEOs of an incumbent enterprise software company thinking deeply in public about what AI...
“Conviction Collapse” and the End of Software as We Know It
In “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” the poet Wallace Stevens wrote, “It is not in the premise that reality is a solid.” That line came to mind during a fascinating conversation with Harper Reed, which amounted to something like “It is no longer in the premise that software is a product.” Harper i...