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 […]
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 […]
This article was originally published on Addy Osmani’s blog. It’s being reposted here with the author’s permission. Roughly: Anytime you find an agent makes a mistake, you take the time to engineer a solution such that the agent never makes that mistake again. We’ve spent the last two years arguing about models. Which one is […]
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 other AI-related topics, almost nobody talks about it. We […]
Ryan Carson has built companies for 25 years, including Treehouse, which taught over a million people to code. He knows what it takes to grow a team. So when he told me he’d raised $2 million in seed funding for his latest company, Untangle, an AI-powered divorce assistant, and had no plans to hire anyone, […]
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, and data architects […]
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 help of agentic AI leds to burnout; it’s fast, it’s fun, but keeping […]
Personal AI doesn’t have to run your life to change it. It just must see you clearly and feed your behavior back to you in a way you can’t dodge. Once you look at AI as feedback loops instead of little butlers, the whole “agent” conversation starts to feel upside down. We’ve overrotated on agents […]
Human-in-the-Loop becomes an operational bottleneck In my previous article, ”The Missing Layer in Agentic AI,” I argued that AI agents need a deterministic execution kernel—a privileged “Kernel Space” that validates every proposed action before it touches the real world. That article focused on what happens at the execution boundary: idempotency, JIT state verification, and DFID-correlated […]