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 to
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 enemy
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: From
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 burn
Generation never was the bottleneck. This week the industry finally started noticing and we're landing on the uncomfortable truth: attention might be all transformer architectures need, but our own attention does not scale. Opus 4.7 shipped with a 35% token tax (but gets more done with fewer
Two independent datasets landed this week that make it hard to keep presenting AI productivity as a global rising tide, and in the same seven days DHH, Charity Majors, Fowler and Beck all arrived at the same uncomfortable conclusion: the window for rational skepticism has closed and its time for
The industry spent this week naming things it couldn't articulate before. They point at structural problems: the debts AI coding creates that aren't in the code, the paradox of agents that solve complexity by generating more of it, and the moment "harness engineering" stopped
This was the week practitioners started naming the costs nobody had been tracking. AI CodeCon crystallized an agent orchestration playbook, but the more interesting signal came from the margins: new vocabulary for the things going wrong. The agentic tar pit. Craft alienation. The liability gap. When people coin terms, they&
Something shifted this week: the industry started naming things it couldn't articulate six months ago. Comprehension debt, craft alienation, agentic CD. These aren't buzzwords. They're diagnostic labels for problems practitioners have been feeling but couldn't pin down. When a field starts coining
As a software engineering professional, you probably feel like you're drowning in slop trying to keep up in this whirlpool of a rapidly changing industry. You do a lot to keep track of these days, but you have even more slop to wade through even to just find