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Owning Code in the Age of AI
March 10, 2026
Software engineering is going through a shift that feels small on the surface but changes something fundamental: code is no longer scarce. For decades, writing software was constrained by human typing...
Read MoreFilesystems are having a moment
March 10, 2026
And here’s the thing that makes all of this matter commercially: coding agents make up the majority of actual AI use cases right now. Anthropic is reportedly approaching profitability, and a hug...
Read More3 Principles for Designing Agent Skills | Block Engineering Blog
March 10, 2026
Skills are an open standard supported by most major AI coding tools: Claude Code, Goose, Cursor, Amp, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, VS Code, and many more. At their simplest, a skill is a folder with a ...
Read MoreDesign-First Collaboration
March 10, 2026
When I pair program with a colleague on something complex, we don’t start at the keyboard. We go to the whiteboard. We sketch components, debate data flow, argue about boundaries. We align on wh...
Read MoreHumans and Agents in Software Engineering Loops
March 10, 2026
We need to adopt classic “shift left” thinking. Once upon a time we wrote all of our code, passed it to a QA team to test, and then tried to fix enough bugs to ship a release. Then we discovered t...
Read MoreMCP is dead. Long live the CLI
March 10, 2026
I’m going to make a bold claim: MCP is already dying. We may not fully realize it yet, but the signs are there. OpenClaw doesn’t support it. Pi doesn’t support it. And for good reason. I tried t...
Read MoreDo AI-enabled companies need fewer people?
March 9, 2026
About a year ago I made some predictions about the effect of AI on programming jobs. Block laid off 40% of its staff claiming AI made them more efficient. Is that really true or did they just over-hir...
Read MoreDo AI-enabled companies need fewer people?
March 9, 2026
About a year ago I made some predictions about the effect of AI on programming jobs. Block laid off 40% of its staff claiming AI made them more efficient. Is that really true or did they just over-hir...
Read MoreIs 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...
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