Code is getting so cheap that everything around it starts to crack: Anthropic replaced git, everyone revisits their code review priors, the people who actually tried running lights-out software factories came back with a familiar lesson. Underneath it all, one discipline keeps resurfacing: let the machine grind at the
Three big "state of the industry"reports landed this week, and they tell two very different stories: At the frontier, agents now open more pull requests than humans. In the median company, an AI seat costs twelve dollars. Meanwhile, mathematicians are going through the emotional maelstrom many developers
The spec-driven development crowd ran headfirst into a lesson us old hats learned decades ago: a sufficiently detailed spec is code. Meanwhile, an OpenAI security engineer told the inside story of this year's incidents, and the "hand coding is dead" crowd grows larger by the
The question moved this week. Nobody serious is still asking whether agents can write the code: the people shipping the most are asking who verifies it, how cheaply, and how to move humans on top of the loop instead of stuck inside it. Meanwhile two new frontier models dropped and
A stealth lab refreshes interest in narrow AI. Agentic coding keeps stressing CI platform infrastructure. The shape of the software factory is converging. Fundamentals matter more than ever. Pacing the frontier is a diversion tactic. My top 3 picks this week * Jev explained in 7min..: Great explainer video on the
AI doomerism reaches new heights. Dark factories slopify codebases faster than anyone can review them. A rogue agent swarm traced back to an attack on RubyGems. A 2x productivity claim that turns out to carry a $20,000 monthly invoice. Generation is cheap, checking is still expensive. My top 3
Multiple model launches took the headlines, none will change how you work on Monday. What might: an engineer shipping 2,000 PRs a month explained their actual method, AWS published what happens when fifty ordinary teams get the same tool, and we further argue that the code review ritual we
Leave dozens of agents alone for long enough and they build themselves a legal system. Uber published the numbers on their software factory. Bill Gates is starting to get nervous. Legacy migrations are tractable today. My top 3 picks this week * The choices we make about AI now are critical:
This week: code review collapsed, a linter that only flags problems turns out to be half a tool, and every repo is a software factory now. Cheap code made architecture visible rather than optional, tokens got a billing layer that Stripe paid $7B for, and the people who ran engineering
Anthropic shipped an invisible watermark into every Claude model launched after August 2, but how effective is it really? The AI productivity gain has a half-life, the slop it leaves behind does not. The tragedy of the cognitive commons: oversight depends on expertise, AI erodes the building of it.
Will CI/CD survive agents? Steve Yegge and Jez Humble seem to disagree. OpenAI's model cracked ten long-open mathematical problems, a mathematician explained precisely what it still cannot do. Datadog deleted a year of carefully maintained context and watched their evals improve. My top 3 picks this
More takes on the software factory, ranging from "nobody has cracked the software factory yet" to "all you need are tests". A new benchmark reveals requirements one checkpoint at a time and puts the first real number on how fast a codebase decays in the hands