Highlights of the Week
How Microsoft Vaporized a Trillion Dollars
https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion-2f5
Moreover, the code was leaking cached entries and even entire caches due to misunderstood memory ownership rules, and suffered from a large number of crashes, in the order of 300,000 to 500,000 crashes per month for the WireServer web server alone across the fleet. New code was throwing C++ exceptions in a codebase that was originally exception-free. The team had coding guidelines in direct contradiction of those of the larger organization, and their testing practices didn’t include long-running tests, so they missed memory leaks and other defects. The team had reached a point where it was too risky to make any code refactoring or engineering improvements. I submitted several bug fixes and refactoring, notably using smart pointers, but they were rejected for fear of breaking something. This further illustrates the pervasive gap in technical leadership throughout the organization.
There’s a few articles I read lately about internal MS practices being a mess. I understand large organisations are all unique in their own way and it never flows as well as it could, but this seems another level through it all.
Agent Responsibly
https://vercel.com/blog/agent-responsibly
There is a fundamental difference between relying on AI and leveraging it. • Relying means assuming that if the agent wrote it and the tests pass, it’s ready to ship. The author never builds a mental model of the change. The result is massive PRs full of hidden assumptions that are impossible to review because neither the author nor the reviewer has a clear picture of what the code actually does. • Leveraging means using agents to iterate quickly while maintaining complete ownership of the output. You know exactly how the code behaves under load. You understand the associated risks. You’re comfortable owning them.
Some Things Just Take Time
https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/3/20/some-things-just-take-time/
There’s a feeling that all the things that create friction in your life should be automated away. That human involvement should be replaced by AI-based decision-making. Because it is the friction of the process that is the problem. When in fact many times the friction, or that things just take time, is precisely the point. There’s a reason we have cooling-off periods for some important decisions in one’s life. We recognize that people need time to think about what they’re doing, and that doing something right once doesn’t mean much because you need to be able to do it over a longer period of time.
How to Kill the Code Review
https://www.latent.space/p/reviews-dead
Spec-driven development is becoming the main way of working with AI. Humans should review specs, plans, constraints, and acceptance criteria—not 500-line diffs. In this new paradigm, Specs become the source of truth. Code becomes an artifact of the spec. You don’t need to review the code. You review the steps. You review the verification rules. You review the contract the code must fulfill. Human-in-the-loop approval moves from “Did you write this correctly?” to “Are we solving the right problem with the right constraints?” The most valuable human judgment is exercised before the first line of code is generated, not after.
Everyone is recognising code reviews as a bottleneck but just getting rid of them doesn’t seem the right one for me. Multiple other layers for sure can help but still.
The Software Development Lifecycle Is Dead
https://boristane.com/blog/the-software-development-lifecycle-is-dead/
The future of observability isn’t dashboards, it’s closed-loop systems where telemetry data becomes context for the agent that shipped the code, so it can detect the regression and fix it. The observability layer becomes the feedback mechanism that drives the entire loop. Not a stage at the end. The connective tissue of the whole system.
This reinforces my opinion that best practices haven’t and won’t change that much to what the end product will look like. What is good for developers is also good for agents. Just now the bad practices will have a much larger negative impact on the progress of the whole thing.