This week we got our write-up of the Bun rewrite for $165k in tokens, Seldo published the numbers on what AI did to the junior market, and Hank Green explained why efficiency gains will make our AI bills bigger, not smaller. Underneath the receipts: the people building software factories
This week Kent Beck repriced some of his own skills at zero, Boris Cherny redrew the org chart and accidentally reinvented a twenty-year-old map, and Cory Doctorow asked the one question that cuts through every AI argument: who is the machine actually working for? My top 4 picks
The spotlight slid off the model and onto everything we wrap around it. We stopped prompting and started writing loops, finance finally found where the tokens are going (on Powerpoint, it turns out), and agents are starting to show up in the team chat with their own logins. The engineering
Loops grew up into agents that spawn their own dynamic workflows. Code got cheap enough to throw away by the plateful, which makes the theory in your team's head the part actually worth preserving. Security took its first real structural swings instead of hoping the model behaves if
This week the ground moved twice: Anthropic shipped its most capable model on Monday and a government directive switched it off by Friday. During that whiplash interest in Ralph loops resurfaced and two large datasets again called the AI productivity bluff. DDD Europe 2026 topped it off with a profound
Russ Miles argued that our governing metaphors recreate Waterfall at the decision level, DORA published evidence that scaling generation without scaling verification creates a J-curve most teams never escape, and rsync proved the point by shipping 36 AI-assisted commits that broke backups worldwide. My top 3 picks this
Code is the result of hundreds of decisions an hour, coding agents that makes them in your stead are not saving you any time. Big tech is waking up to the fact that tokenmaxxing only results in higher inference bills. My top 3 picks this week * Demo: The Human + AI-
OpenAI ran a negative 122% operating margin in Q1, Andrej Karpathy reframed his own term "vibe coding" as "raising the floor for everyone", putting it in sharp contrast with "agentic engineering". Giants like Google and Anthropic are hiring forward-deployed engineers by the dozen
Harness engineering is gaining traction, the maintenance bill from a year of vibe coding is coming due, and METR puts the first credible number on agent autonomy. The vocabulary of 2026 is stabilizing in front of us. My top 3 picks this week * Machines of Code and Grace: Great podcast
This week DORA weighs in on AI-assisted software development ROI in enterprise, the bottleneck conversation finally is starting to move up- and downstream from code to organization concerns, we gave the cognitive cost a sharper name and it turns out that in dire times, the enemy of my OpenAI
The honeymoon ended in stereo this week. More hard data on AI velocity landed (10-15%, not the 3X your CEO has been quoting), the pricing reset got calendar entries, the techlash got organised into actual policy, more takes on harness engineering. My top 3 picks this week * Andrej Karpathy:
This week, the receipts arrived from every direction at once. Thoughtworks' Tech Radar reads like a warning letter, frontier models silently corrupt a quarter of what you delegate to them, and the companies that told you AI would pay for itself are doubling their price, while employees world-wide