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 begins with a real goal and, usually, a sensible […]
This is the third article in a series on agentic engineering and AI-driven development. Read part one here, part two here, part three here, and look for the next article on April 23 on O’Reilly Radar. Here’s the dirty secret of the AI coding revolution: most experienced developers still don’t really trust the code the AI writes for […]
I can’t claim to be a professional software developer—not by a long shot. I occasionally write some Python code to analyze spreadsheets, and I occasionally hack something together on my own, usually related to prime numbers or numerical analysis. But I have to admit that I identify with both of the groups of programmers that […]
The following article originally appeared on Addy Osmani’s blog site and is being reposted here with the author’s permission. Comprehension debt is the hidden cost to human intelligence and memory resulting from excessive reliance on AI and automation. For engineers, it applies most to agentic engineering. There’s a cost that doesn’t show up in your […]
Luca Mezzalira, author of Building Micro-Frontends, originally shared the following article on LinkedIn. It’s being republished here with his permission. Every few years, something arrives that promises to change how we build software. And every few years, the industry splits predictably: One half declares the old rules dead; the other half folds its arms and […]
A funny thing happened on the way to writing our book Architecture as Code—the entire industry shifted. Generally, we write books iteratively—starting with a seed of an idea, then developing it through workshops, conference presentations, online classes, and so on. That’s exactly what we did about a year ago with our Architecture as Code book. […]
The current conversation about AI in software development is still happening at the wrong layer. Most of the attention goes to code generation. Can the model write a method, scaffold an API, refactor a service, or generate tests? Those things matter, and they are often useful. But they are not the hard part of enterprise […]
Farewell, Anthropocene, we hardly knew ye. 🌹 AI is here. It’s won. Yes, it’s in that awkward teenage phase where it still says inappropriate things, dresses funny, and sometimes makes shit up when it shouldn’t. But zomg the things it can do. 😱 This kid is going places, that much is abundantly clear. The AI […]
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 means […]
For years, persuasion has been the most valuable skill in digital commerce. Brands spend millions on ad copy, testing button colours, and designing landing pages to encourage people to click “Buy Now.” All of this assumes the buyer is a person who can see. But an autonomous AI shopping agent does not have eyes. I […]
The following article originally appeared on Drew Breunig’s blog and is being republished here with the author’s permission. In 1998, Eric S. Raymond published the founding text of open source software development, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. In it, he detailed two methods of building software: The bazaar model was enabled by the internet, which […]
This is the third article in a series on agentic engineering and AI-driven development. Read part one here, part two here, and look for the next article on April 15 on O’Reilly Radar. The toolkit pattern is a way of documenting your project’s configuration so that any AI can generate working inputs from a plain-English description. […]
The following article originally appeared on Medium and is being republished here with the author’s permission. Ask 10 developers which LLM they’d recommend and you’ll get 10 different answers—and almost none of them are based on objective comparison. What you’ll get instead is a reflection of the models they happen to have access to, the […]
On February 10, 2026, Scott Shambaugh—a volunteer maintainer for Matplotlib, one of the world’s most popular open source software libraries—rejected a proposed code change. Why? Because an AI agent wrote it. Standard policy. What happened next wasn’t standard, though. The AI agent autonomously researched Shambaugh’s code contribution history and published a highly personalized hit piece […]
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 is one […]