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AI-Assisted Development at Block | Block Engineering Blog
January 19, 2026
About 95% of our engineers are regularly using AI to assist with their development efforts. The largest population is at Stage 5, running a single agent mostly outside of an IDE. The second largest po...
Read MorePorting MiniJinja to Go With an Agent
January 16, 2026
Turns out you can just port things now. I already attempted this experiment in the summer, but it turned out to be a bit too much for what I had time for. However, things have advanced since. Yesterda...
Read MoreMike Olson – Managing AI Like You Manage People
January 16, 2026
With the release of Claude Opus 4.5 (and the pace of improvement in frontier models), we’ve reached the point where AI coding assistants can handle tasks that would previously require a team of skil...
Read MoreThe Economics of AI Coding: A Real-World Analysis
January 15, 2026
My whole stream in the past months has been about AI coding. From skeptical engineers who say it creates unmaintainable code, to enthusiastic (or scared) engineers who say it will replace us all, the ...
Read MoreAgent Guardrails and Controls | Block Engineering Blog
January 14, 2026
In our previous blog post, Securing the Model Context Protocol, we detailed the Model Context Protocol (MCP) system and discussed some security concerns and mitigations. As a brief recap, MCP provides...
Read MoreWhy AI is pushing developers toward typed languages – The GitHub Blog
January 14, 2026
It’s a tale as old as time: tabs vs. spaces, dark mode vs. light mode, typed languages vs. untyped languages. It all depends! But as developers use AI tools, not only are they choosing the more popu...
Read MoreAll I Want for Christmas is a Better Alt Text – Part 1
January 14, 2026
Earlier this year, I built the backend for the local alt text generation feature in Firefox. Nearly half of the images on the web still lack alternative text, creating a major accessibility barrier fo...
Read MoreTesting Pyramid of AI Agents | Block Engineering Blog
January 14, 2026
I’m a huge advocate for software testing and have written and spoken quite a bit about the testing pyramid. Unit tests at the bottom. Integration tests in the middle. UI tests at the top. Fewer ...
Read MoreIntroducing beginners to the mechanics of machine learning – Miriam Posner
January 14, 2026
Every year, I spend some time introducing students to the mechanics of machine learning with neural nets. I definitely don’t go into great depth; I usually only have one class for this. But I try to...
Read MoreBlock red-teamed its own AI agent to run an infostealer • The Register
January 14, 2026
“Being CISO is very much about being okay with ambiguity and being uncomfortable in situations,” Nettesheim said. “We are balancing risk constantly, and having to make trade off R...
Read More“AI” is bad UX
January 13, 2026
This is in many ways a worst case scenario for user experience. An application where clicking “save” deletes your files. An icon where clicking and dragging it makes thousands of copies. A...
Read MoreAttention? Attention!
January 13, 2026
Attention is, to some extent, motivated by how we pay visual attention to different regions of an image or correlate words in one sentence. Take the picture of a Shiba Inu in Fig. 1 as an example. Hum...
Read MoreGetting started with Claude for software development
January 13, 2026
2025 was an interesting year in many ways. One way in which it was interesting for me is that I went from an AI hater to a pretty big user. And so I’ve had a few requests for a “using Claude” gu...
Read MoreOrigin Story: A Tale of Two Ralphs
January 13, 2026
Origin Story: A Tale of Two Ralphs To understand the “Ralph” tool is to understand a new approach toward improving autonomous AI coding performance — one that relies on brute force, fail...
Read MoreLLM predictions for 2026, shared with Oxide and Friends
January 13, 2026
In 2023, saying that LLMs write garbage code was entirely correct. For most of 2024 that stayed true. In 2025 that changed, but you could be forgiven for continuing to hold out. In 2026 the quality of...
Read MoreDon’t fall into the anti-AI hype –
January 12, 2026
Anyway, back to programming. I have a single suggestion for you, my friend. Whatever you believe about what the Right Thing should be, you can't control it by refusing what is happening right now...
Read MoreOpening and Closing Dialogs Without JavaScript Using HTML Invoker Commands
January 12, 2026
The native <dialog> element was a huge step forward for web developers. It gave us a standardized way to create modal dialogs with built-in backdrop handling, focus management, and keyboard inte...
Read MoreThe rise of industrial software
January 9, 2026
Traditionally, software has been expensive to produce, with expense driven largely by the labour costs of a highly skilled and specialised workforce. This workforce has also constituted a bottleneck f...
Read Moredavidbau.com Vibe Coding
December 22, 2025
Two Kinds of Vibe Coding There are two categories of vibe coding. One is when you delegate little tasks to a coding LM while keeping yourself as the human “real programmer” fully informed ...
Read MoreBelieve the Checkbook
December 22, 2025
Everyone’s heard the line: “AI will write all the code; engineering as you know it is finished.”Boards repeat it. CFOs love it. Some CTOs quietly use it to justify hiring freezes and stalled pro...
Read MoreYour job is to deliver code you have proven to work
December 19, 2025
Source: Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work...
Read MoreWhat happens when the coding becomes the least interesting part of the work
December 18, 2025
That judgment is the job of a senior engineer. As far as I can tell, nobody is replacing that job with a coding agent anytime soon. Or if they are, they’re not talking about it publicly. I think it...
Read MoreHow I wrote JustHTML using coding agents
December 18, 2025
Writing a full HTML5 parser is not a short one-shot problem. I have been working on this project for a couple of months on off-hours.Tooling: I used plain VS Code with Github Copilot in Agent mode. I ...
Read MoreThe Bet On Juniors Just Got Better
December 17, 2025
Junior developer—obsolete accessory or valuable investment? How does the genie change the analysis? Folks are taking knee-jerk action around the advent of AI—slowing hiring, firing all the juniors...
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