Highlights of the Week

You Will Know Nothing and Be Happy

https://seattledataguy.substack.com/p/you-will-know-nothing-and-be-happy

But there’s a difference between using AI to accelerate your thinking and using AI to replace your thinking!

Previously we built up our mental maps of how things work by writing code. However now that has changed and we need to figure out what the new thing is.

Production Is Where the Rigor Goes

https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/production-is-where-the-rigor-goes

The notes describe five destinations where rigor is already moving to: • Upstream to specification review • Into test suites as first-class artifacts • Into type systems and constraints • Into risk mapping • Into continuous comprehension All of these are great and exciting. Beefing up your pre-production test quality, capturing intent in specification docs, separating specs from constraints, revisiting the jobs to be done by code review, yes yes yes, all of that. Yes please. But where is production on that list? If control is supposed to be moving “closer to reality,” what is closer to reality than your production systems? Production is reality! Reality is production!

Observability has always been a bit of an afterthought at most companies, just like documentation, but new AI systems can make it so much more useful that everyone might start actually caring about them again. Just writing tests and docs for your code is never going to replicate the messy realities of production system so instead we need to be able to see what is going on there and use that as context for the AI to build

Highlights of the Week

AI Should Help Us Produce Better Code - Agentic Engineering Patterns - Simon Willison’s Weblog

https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-patterns/better-code/

I like to think about shipping better code in terms of technical debt. We take on technical debt as the result of trade-offs: doing things “the right way” would take too long, so we work within the time constraints we are under and cross our fingers that our project will survive long enough to pay down the debt later on.

AI tools will allow us to do things differently and one outcome of code becoming much cheaper to write is old tech debt now becomes doable at a fraction of the old cost. So refactoring or code smells can be fixed now without having to try sneak it in to the sprint.

Every Layer of Review Makes You 10x Slower

https://apenwarr.ca/log/20260316

Every layer of approval makes a process 10x slower I know what you’re thinking. Come on, 10x? That’s a lot. It’s unfathomable. Surely we’re exaggerating. Nope. Just to be clear, we’re counting “wall clock time” here rather than effort. Almost all the extra time is spent sitting and waiting. Look: • Code a simple bug fix 30 minutes • Get it code reviewed by the peer next to you 300 minutes → 5 hours → half a day • Get a design doc approved by your architects team first 50 hours → about a week • Get it on some other team’s calendar to do all that (for example, if a customer requests

Intro

Highlights of the Week

Zen of AI Coding

https://nonstructured.com/zen-of-ai-coding/

The cost of changing your mind is lower than it has ever been. Architectural decisions that once felt permanent are now provisional. You chose React. Two months later, you regret it. Ask an agent to rewrite the project. Making imperfect decisions is no longer fatal. In fact, it can be productive. A flawed reference implementation provides better context than a pristine specification. Agents reason more effectively from concrete artifacts than from abstract intent. Rapid iteration is now the default mode.

Building for Trillions of Agents

https://x.com/levie/status/2030714592238956960/?rw_tt_thread=True

Just as designing for users meant putting yourself in their shoes when building software, the same is true when thinking about what agents will run into. For instance, Jared Friedman at YCombinator put everyone on notice: “Even the best developer tools mostly still don’t let you sign up for an account via API. This is a big miss in the claude code age because it means that claude can’t sign up on its own. Putting all your account management functions in your API should be tablestakes now." If an agent can’t easily sign up for your service and starting using it, you’re basically dead to agents.

We’re definitely going to see new forms of companies the next while but what they’ll be is another thing. This is and interesting idea where they could be ones that are more focused on agents and enabling agents than people. The agents are customers not people. For example Ramp released agent cards recently where you give

Intro

Another week of AI things. Not as much here this time but there’s still a lot happening.

Highlights of the Week

My (Hypothetical) SRECon26 Keynote

https://charitydotwtf.substack.com/p/my-hypothetical-srecon26-keynote

If I was giving the keynote at SRECon 2026, I would ditch the begrudging stance. I would start by acknowledging that AI is radically changing the way we build software. It’s here, it’s happening, and it is coming for us all.

It is very, very hard to adjust to change that is being forced on you. So please don’t wait for it to be forced on you. Swim out to meet it. Find your way in, find something to get excited about.

The Edge of Mathematics - The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/02/ai-math-terrance-tao/686107/

Tao has long been intrigued by, but reserved about, what AI tools can do for his field. The first time we spoke, in the fall of 2024, Tao had likened chatbots to “mediocre, but not completely incompetent” graduate students. About six months later, he told me the models had gotten better “at certain types of high-level math reasoning,” but lacked creativity and made subtle mistakes. But during our most recent conversation, he was more bullish. AI may not be on the cusp of solving all of the world’s great math problems, but chatbots are at the point where they can collaborate with human mathematicians. In the process, he said, the technology is opening up a different “way of doing mathematics.”

Time and time again people have dismissed all AI as being not that great only to revisit it months down the line

photography on film, music on vinyl

I like the sound of it, with the way things are going. Potentially could add writing on paper or with ink or something of the sort. Reading on paper, writing on ink. Get away from the screen for a bit and get out doing other things. Saw it on the subtitle of a YouTube video. Ironic I know.

photography on film, music on vinyl reading on paper, writing on ink

Intro

The theme of this week is dev tools are agent tools too. So good practices are still just that. AI will change some things but it will mainly just reinforce the good practices of before. If you don’t have those set up, throwing money at AI isn’t going to change things for you a whole lot either.

Highlights of the Week

The Factory Model: How Coding Agents Changed Software Engineering

https://addyosmani.com/blog/factory-model/

The barrier to creating software has genuinely dropped. That is not hype. What it means for professional engineers is not that their skills are less valuable, but that the skills that matter have shifted up the stack, as they have in every previous transition.

The engineers who will have the most impact in this era will not be distinguished by how fast they type or how well they remember syntax. They will be distinguished by a different set of capabilities. Systems thinking. The ability to hold a complex architecture in mind, understand how components interact, and anticipate how a change in one place affects behavior elsewhere. This is harder to develop than typing speed and far more valuable when you are managing a fleet of agents whose outputs you have to integrate. Problem decomposition. Knowing how to break a large, ambiguous goal into well-scoped subtasks that an agent can execute reliably. Tasks that are too large tend to go off-track. Tasks that are poorly scoped get interpreted incorrectly. The skill of decomposing problems well, and then verifying that the decomposition was right, is a genuine

Intro

I’ve been quite late with this one but at least it is out in some shape or form. It still contains the things I read during the week 6 but a few days late. A lot of AI stuff again this time. I’m not sure if I am or am not that interested in all this still. Some is good but the way absolutely everyone is reading and writing about the same stuff all means there’s a lot of stuff that isn’t that useful or only slight variations of others.

Highlights of the Week

The Only Skill That Matters Now

https://worksonmymachine.ai/p/the-only-skill-that-matters-now

Anyway, yeah, like I said earlier, Gretzky could already skate. He was incredibly agile. He could stop on a dime. Change direction mid-stride. His edges were so good he could literally dance on ice.

He didn’t become great because he predicted the puck. He became great because he could actually get to ANY position on the ice and be open. The prediction was secondary to the skating.

That’s where we are now. Except our skates are prompts. Our ice is context windows. Our edges are knowing how to talk to Claude or Gemini or whatever comes out next that makes both of them obsolete.

The only skill that matters is being able to adapt to whatever scenario comes towards us. So instead of trying to predict where things are going, focus on having a good baseline and being able to adapt. Sounds good in theory and all that

Intro

More AI stuff this week again like the last before it. I don’t think anybody really knows how these things will all play out but that hasn’t stopped everyone making lots of predictions.

Highlights of the Week

Raising a Special Little AI

By Not Boring

Having said that, I do subscribe to the Chris Dixon views that The next big thing will start out looking like a toy and What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years, so if this many people are captivated, there’s something going on.

I left FAANG for a startup and regretted it

https://lawrenceztang.substack.com/p/i-left-faang-for-a-startup-and-regretted No highlights from this but a great read all the same. It is very difficult to give all hours to someone else’s idea.

The way I run standup meetings

https://marcgg.com/blog/2024/11/20/standup

The objective of this meeting is to share interesting things relevant to your team and raise blockers. What we find “interesting” will vary depending on context. Use your best judgment and don’t hesitate to ask the group if this is interesting to them.

You will hear updates not impacting you directly. Maybe things you don’t understand fully. This is normal and by design. However your goal is to pay attention to everything, be curious and try to understand what everyone is sharing. Don’t hesitate to ask questions after the meeting.

Lots of meetings are BS but the daily standup is one of the better ones, at least in my experience. Especially on remote teams it is easy to loose contact and context with what is

Intro

Spend a few days in Madrid this week and spent those days exploring the city rather than reading so a light one this time. I did read a lot of the book “Dead in the Water” and though I haven’t finished it yet it is really interesting. Reads something of a thriller though based on a true tale. I’ve read a few books on shipping and it seems like an awful industry for almost everyone involved. Little to no laws for the workers, margins are cutthroat for those at the top. It really seems to only benefit those of dubious morals who can and will take whatever shortcuts necessary to benefit the bottom line. Or just do the insurance as this book points out which seems to be a great business if once again you’re okay with turning the blind eye to a bit of fraud every now and again as a cost of doing business.

Highlights of the Week

Carney, Trump and the power of a good speech

https://www.ft.com/content/1b23eeb6-03a2-42c8-9d02-60c672ad6298

An underrated part of being a good leader is that you shouldn’t have to tell people what to do all the time. Instead, they should be able to anticipate what you want and what doing a good job looks like. There are lots of ways to do this — leading by example is one — but the bigger and more complex the organisation you lead, the more important it is that people know what you want without having to ask.

The speech itself was very good, from