The following originally appeared on Hugo Bowne-Anderson’s Vanishing Gradients Substack and is being republished here with the author’s permission. The conversation around harness engineering is dominated by problems from coding and personal agents such as OpenClaw, but most agents are simpler. Builders should avoid over-engineering for capabilities that newer models may absorb anyway, the “Kirby […]

Managers have been disproportionate casualties of the rolling waves of post-COVID-19 tech layoffs that started in late 2022. Popularized by large companies such as Meta, Google, and Amazon, phrases like “flattening the org” and “reducing bureaucracy” are now synonymous with thinning the management layers that ballooned during the 2021–2022 hiring sprees. Retrospectively, such flattening can […]

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, dispatching instructions to […]

We kicked off Zero to Agent in 30 Minutes this week with guest John Berryman, an AI consultant and contractor for Arcturus Labs. John has spent the past several years building AI products and consulting on how teams put them into production. He set the stage by defining an agent as a large language model […]

Somewhere in a Singapore data center, a bank is paying for eight H100s that spend most of the night waiting. The cluster was bought for good reasons (discomfort with customer documents leaving the building, a strategy team’s aversion to lock-in), so the bank secured its own sovereign compute. Now the finance team is asking why […]

Christina Stathopoulos, the data and AI evangelist behind Dare to Data, continued her run sorting the week’s most impactful stories into a handful of themes we’ve been watching play out over the past month: more firms investing in the compute AI runs on, more concerns about who controls a model’s borders, and more AI-generated code […]

I keep seeing the same idea in conversations about agents: Detailed specs are old-world overhead now. Give the model a rough goal, let it explore, fix what comes back, move on. It sounds efficient but it also hides the cost. A simple prompt looks cheap and tempting because it gets implementation started right away. Then […]

AI has taken software development by storm. Between the two of us, we build products for software engineers and consumer products for millions of everyday users, so we have skin in the game. We want the AI productivity story to be true. More output, tighter timelines, happier and more productive engineers. Who wouldn’t? But when we […]

Autonomous agents are moving faster than the field’s ability to govern them, and catching up requires more than better prompts or bigger sandboxes. At O’Reilly’s recent AI Superstream focused on OpenClaw and the broader ecosystem of locally run and self-hosted AI agents, five speakers, each working at a different layer of the stack, explored patterns […]

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 actually matter, plus six figures […]

The following article originally appeared on Paolo Perrone’s Substack, The AI Engineer, and is being republished here with the author’s permission. You spent three weeks shipping an agent. It worked in the demo. Then production hit, and you realized the framework you picked has no checkpointing, the memory layer is a flat vector dump with […]

AI-assisted development has made frontend work feel much faster. A developer can ask for a form, a dashboard card, a table, a modal, or a responsive layout and get a decent first version almost immediately. The code may compile. The page may render. At first glance, the UI may look done. But frontend developers know […]

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 oversight into frontier model companies, and a […]

The incident that should worry you makes no destructive call. Nothing is deleted, nothing crashes, no alert fires. An employee asks an agent to summarise a customer ticket; the agent does exactly that, the user gets a useful answer, and somewhere, in the same second, a customer record leaves the cluster over an ordinary HTTPS […]

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. Difficult engineering problems solved, backlogs cleared. Rewrites that would have […]

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, so heavy upfront specification is bureaucratic overhead you don’t need […]

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 political scientist at George Washington University, opens his book […]

Coauthored with Claude The soap opera starring Anthropic and the US government looms in the background of this month’s Trends. It may be over by the time you read this, or it may be headed for a third act. OpenAI has been drawn in, and a spat between Alibaba and Anthropic may become a side […]

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 developer educator on LinkedIn Learning, to […]

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 their teams should work with AI in […]