As syntax becomes cheap and abundant, architectural control becomes the scarce resource. Effective governance starts upstream, where intent, constraints, and threat models shape the agent’s working context before generation begins. The goal isn’t better prompting but build-time boundaries that prevent structurally invalid code from entering the system. The Frankenstein factories The dark factories (as Dan […]
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 share of its own medicines through public […]
With the rise of agents, many people have been proclaiming that the age of software as a service (SaaS) is over. Who needs to subscribe to a service when you can create your own software with a few English-language prompts and a few dollars spent on tokens? Your own software, most likely a skill that […]
The following article originally appeared on the Asimov’s Addendum Substack and is being reposted here with the author’s permission. Bill Gurley has an excellent article on what he calls open source strategy, which we recommend reading. There is a lot to debate about his concluding argument in particular: that open-weight models are central to keeping the AI market […]
This is the seventh article in a series on agentic engineering and AI-driven development. Read part one here, part two here, part three here, part four here, part five here, and part six here. This is the latest article in my Radar series on AI-driven development and agentic engineering, and I have to admit that this one took a bit of […]
Last week, we had our first Infrastructure & Ops superstream of 2026, Platform Engineering in the Age of AI. Our speakers explored a range of topics focused on supporting new AI workloads, each with unique infrastructure needs, unpredictable costs, and novel security concerns. Google Cloud’s Abdel Sghiouar took the audience through what a good platform […]
The following article originally appeared on Addy Osmani’s blog and is being reposted here with the author’s permission. The default behavior of any AI coding agent is to take the shortest path to “done.” Ask for a feature and it writes the feature. It doesn’t ask whether you have a spec, write a test before […]
Your AI agent booked a meeting, summarized a financial report, and emailed the highlights to three stakeholders. To do this, it called a calendar agent, a document analysis agent, and an email agent. Each accessed internal systems, made decisions about what to include, and acted on your behalf. Here’s the question your security team can’t […]
We kicked off our new weekly series This Week in AI on Monday, and we covered a lot of ground in 30 minutes, including an AI model that found security holes faster than decades of human auditing, a data center in Utah the size of two Manhattans, and a practical argument for why the harness […]
For over a century, both the prestige and budget of a corporate department have been measured by a single crude metric: headcount. If you manage 500 people, you’re a “distinguished leader.” If you manage five, you’re a footnote. This “empire of headcount” has governed everything from office square footage to C-suite influence. It’s the fundamental […]
The following article originally appeared on the Elevate newsletter and is being reposted here with the author’s permission. Peek under the hood of most “production agents” shipping today and you won’t find intelligence. You’ll find custom plumbing, fragile session logic, shared service accounts, and a security model held together by hope. This can be so […]
The following article originally appeared on the Elevate newsletter and is being reposted here with the author’s permission. Peek under the hood of most “production agents” shipping today and you won’t find intelligence. You’ll find custom plumbing, fragile session logic, shared service accounts, and a security model held together by hope. This can be so […]
Another day, another example of an AI Agent “running rogue” and doing something the human operator didn’t want it to do. The tl;dr is that Jeremy (Jer) Crane, founder of PocketOS, was using Claude to perform some routine DB maintenance. Claude then proceeded to delete the production database and all backups hosted at their cloud […]
Companies everywhere are trying to leverage AI to boost internal productivity metrics. Some, like Ramp and Intercom, are succeeding. Many are failing. To make matters more complicated, the narrative around what tooling enables these gains is constantly shifting. For software engineers, auto-complete via GitHub Copilot was the bleeding-edge tool of choice in 2024. Then it […]
This post was originally published on The Nuanced Perspective and is being reposted here with the authors’ permission. Agent skills are everywhere right now. Atlassian built them into Rovo so agents can automatically triage Jira tickets, draft Confluence pages, and route service requests without anyone typing a prompt. Canva and Figma use them so Claude […]