Elsewhere
Things we find interesting we think you might too. Grab the RSS feed for your newsreader of choice.
Is the AI Compute Crunch Here?
March 9, 2026
In January I wrote about the coming AI compute crunch. Two months later, I think “coming” was the wrong word. We’re starting to see serious signs that some providers are really strug...
Read MoreThe Human-in-the-Loop is Tired
March 9, 2026
I recently had a conversation with my colleague Douwe, who maintains the Pydantic AI framework and has been one of the most thoughtful people I know about integrating LLMs into open source workflows. ...
Read MoreThe illusion of “The Illusion of Thinking”
March 9, 2026
Very recently (early June 2025), Apple released a paper called The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity. This has be...
Read MoreStart where you are: A practical guide to building with AI
March 9, 2026
Here’s the thing I want to emphasize, though: this is a really good time to get good at this. The best practices for building with AI haven’t been written yet. Builders like you and me get to writ...
Read MoreAI Is Creating an Identity Crisis for Software Engineers – Business Insider
March 9, 2026
The speed at which AI is reshaping software development — measured in months, not years — is stirring a mix of excitement and anxiety. Last week, the tech company Block laid off more than 40% of i...
Read MoreA soft-landing manual for the second gilded age
March 9, 2026
AI is arriving fast, the old economic arrangements are visibly failing, and the dominant narratives about what comes next have split into 2 equally unhelpful camps: utopian accelerationists who believ...
Read MoreAI-first design is a culture shift, not a tooling upgrade
March 9, 2026
What interests me is something far less theatrical and far more consequential: how AI fundamentally changes the way product organisations learn. Over the past 6 months, we have invested deeply in AI-f...
Read More[2602.11988] Evaluating AGENTS.md: Are Repository-Level Context Files Helpful for Coding Agents?
March 9, 2026
Abstract:A widespread practice in software development is to tailor coding agents to repositories using context files, such as this http URL, by either manually or automatically generating them. Altho...
Read MoreAI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Engineering Harder.
March 9, 2026
AI assistants autocomplete your functions. Agents scaffold entire features. You can describe what you want in plain English and watch working code appear in seconds. The barrier to producing code has ...
Read MoreAI And The Ship of Theseus | Armin Ronacher’s Thoughts and Writings
March 6, 2026
Because code gets cheaper and cheaper to write, this includes re-implementations. I mentioned recently that I had an AI port one of my libraries to another language and it ended up choosing a differen...
Read MoreIs Harness Engineering real?
March 6, 2026
A common debate in my finance days was about the value of the human vs the value of the seat: if a trader made $3m in profits, how much of it was because of her skills, and how much was because of the...
Read MoreA Dream of Spring for Open-Weight LLMs: 10 Architectures from Jan-Feb 2026
March 6, 2026
In this article, I will walk you through the ten main releases in chronological order, with a focus on the architecture similarities and differences: Since there’s a lot of ground to cover, I will b...
Read MoreYes, Learning to Code Is Still Valuable
March 6, 2026
Every few weeks, someone shares a bold opinion: “Don’t bother learning to code, AI will do it all.” I’ve seen this from VCs, influencers, and people who have never actually shi...
Read MoreWe are Changing our Developer Productivity Experiment Design – METR
March 6, 2026
METR previously published a paper which found the use of AI tools caused a 20% slowdown in completing tasks among experienced open-source developers, using data from February to June 2025. To understa...
Read MoreBecoming a Web AI Practitioner: A Map of the Emerging Stack
March 6, 2026
I quickly became fascinated with all the latest “Web AI” technologies, such as WebMCP, MCP Apps, MCP-UI, OpenAI’s Apps SDK, Google’s A2UI, and more. You’ll notice that MCP — the Model Cont...
Read MoreDemystifying evals for AI agents
March 6, 2026
Good evaluations help teams ship AI agents more confidently. Without them, it’s easy to get stuck in reactive loops—catching issues only in production, where fixing one failure creates others. Eva...
Read MoreWhen AI writes almost all code, what happens to software engineering?
March 6, 2026
The bad: declining value of expertise. Prototyping, being a language polyglot or a specialist in a stack are likely to be a lot less valuable, looking ahead. The good: software engineers more valuable...
Read MoreThe Software Development Lifecycle Is Dead
March 6, 2026
AI agents didn’t make the SDLC faster. They killed it. I keep hearing people talk about AI as a “10x developer tool.” That framing is wrong. It assumes the workflow stays the same and the speed ...
Read MoreEmbrace the uncertainty
March 5, 2026
I am a huge AI optimist. In part because that’s just who I am as a person, I’m always pretty optimistic. But I’m also optimistic because I’ve thought carefully about the alternative, and the a...
Read MoreWhen Systems Collide: Designing for Emergence
March 5, 2026
Every mature product eventually surprises its creators. Emergence isn’t a software invention, it’s a well-established property of living systems in nature. But the concept remains consistent: when...
Read MoreThere Is No Product
March 5, 2026
Here’s the question every software company needs to answer: is the software you’re building an asset or inventory? If building an HRMS takes a team of engineers six months and costs half a million...
Read MoreThe End of the Office
March 5, 2026
This automation wave will kick millions of white-collar workers to the curb in the next 12 – 18 months. As one company starts to streamline, all of their competitors will follow suit. It will be...
Read MoreSoftware Practices from the Scrap Heap?
March 5, 2026
I’m going to keep writing half baked things about AI, because it’s what I’m spending a noticeable number of hours thinking about these days, and because I don’t think it’s possible to be ful...
Read MoreRupert Manfredi – Demoing the AI computer that doesn’t yet exist
March 5, 2026
What happens if you take the idea that AI is going to revolutionize computing seriously? You might argue we’re already doing this as an industry: we’ve spent untold billions on frontier models; hy...
Read More