The release of Gemma 4 has added energy to the discussion of local models and their importance. Models that you can download and run on hardware you own are becoming competitive with the “frontier models” hosted by large AI providers. These models have gotten good enough for production use, good enough for tasks that until […]
Cat Wu leads product for Claude Code and Cowork at Anthropic, so she’s well-versed in building reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. And since 90% of Anthropic’s code is now written by Claude Code, she’s also deeply familiar with fitting them into routine day-to-day work. Last month, Cat joined Addy Osmani at AI Codecon for […]
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 of the neighborhood. […]
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 it works. […]
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 the system is considered healthy. Even in […]
A colleague told me something recently that I keep thinking about. She said, unprompted, that she appreciated seeing both sides of my AI conversations. Not just the output. The full thread. My prompts, the AI’s responses, the back and forth, the dead ends, the iterations. She said it made her trust me more. This piece […]
ChatGPT has been publicly available for over three years now, and generative AI is woven into the tools students use every day: web search, word processors, code editors. You might assume that by now, most programming instructors have figured out how to handle it. But when my collaborators and I went looking for computing instructors […]
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 queries to approved data sources, expresses uncertainty appropriately in ambiguous cases, and maintains source […]
The following article originally appeared on the Asimov’s Addendum Substack and is being republished here with the author’s permission. Are LLMs reliable? LLMs have built up a reputation for being unreliable. Small changes in the input can lead to massive changes in the output. The same prompt run twice can give different or contradictory answers. […]
The following article originally appeared on “Dan Shapiro’s blog” and is being reposted here with the author’s permission. Companies are now producing dark factories—engines that turn specs into shipping software. The implementations can be complex and sometimes involve Mad Max metaphors. But they don’t have to be like that. If you want a five-minute factory, […]
We all read it in the daily news. The New York Times reports that economists who once dismissed the AI job threat are now taking it seriously. In February, Jack Dorsey cut 40% of Block’s workforce, telling shareholders that “intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company.” Block’s stock rose […]
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 […]