Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Carson Gross argues that Markdown has become a first-class source artifact for LLM-built software systems, and that treating it like code in /src follows the same locality and clarity principles as HTML-in-/src.
6 min · 1,398 words
Let the model talk. Don't let it touch the money.
Destiny Ezenwata on the hard boundary in CreditWithBleon: the LLM may converse freely, but money-moving steps stay in deterministic code—and why that line has held in production.
8 min · 1,743 words
It Was the Harness, Not the Model — 90% of ItFive agents, one local model, one frozen PNG-decoder suite: most failures were finishing, false passes, and loop guards
Greg Herlein's controlled study runs five coding agents on the same local Qwen coder for a held-out PNG decoder suite. ~90% of failures were harness problems (turn caps, early 'done', false-pass self-tests); a bigger quantization fixed none of them.
2 min · 467 words
Managing the Hidden Overhead of AI Software Engineering
Jessica Doering on verification debt: AI coding tools move the bottleneck from typing to review, why opening another agent terminal feels productive, and habits that spend reclaimed time on specs, docs, and understanding.
3 min · 725 words
Building Software That Can Prove Agents WrongWhat changes when implementation becomes cheaper than verification
Rafael Câmara argues that once coding agents implement faster than they can verify, the limiting factor is application design: software must expose cheap, independent evidence that can prove an agent's change wrong—not just look right on the happy path.
2 min · 486 words
Arcturus Labs compares OpenAI’s emerging decision-model direction with TypeSafe’s Jev—and asks whether a frontier lab can absorb the System One / structured-decision niche startups are building.
12 min · 2,748 words
Trail of Bits explains why SAML—the XML-based SSO protocol—is structurally fragile: XML complexity, canonicalization pitfalls, enveloped signatures, and a long history of authentication bypasses.
11 min · 2,464 words
PgDog’s Lev Kokotov on why engineers fix open problems they care about, why ownership beats closed-source support tickets, and how free-as-in-freedom Postgres sharding funds itself with enterprise SLAs.
2 min · 387 words
In Search of a Compositional Theory of Self-Stabilization
Murat Demirbas connects metastable failures to classical self-stabilization and asks what a compositional theory would need to make distributed recovery composable.
10 min · 2,248 words
A new world airport and its baggage
A longform history of Denver International Airport’s automated baggage system: ambition, failure, and what the wreckage still teaches about complex infrastructure.
32 min · 7,322 words
Done, Keys, and a Second Check
An operating-model essay arguing enterprises need ownership of done, keys, escalate/monitor rights, and a second check—not just consumer-style AI agents that complete tasks.
5 min · 1,180 words
Why Does AI Code Confidence Increase When Your Risk Should Too?
William Moore on the confidence trap in AI coding tools: fluency peaks on high-stakes auth/payments/migrations because they are common in training data—treat certainty as an inverse risk signal and force failure-mode reasoning.
2 min · 390 words
Bryan Cantrill reflects on Sun Microsystems’ culture and mistakes—what Oxide’s homage tees revive, and which lessons still matter for hardware-software companies.
3 min · 718 words
XNS argues wallets should only verify, authorize, sign, and broadcast—leaving construction and UX to apps—so independent reverse-checks catch compromised transaction builders.
7 min · 1,697 words
the senior engineer death spiralon proving yourself, burning out, and being a good teammate
Sunil Pai names a common failure mode for engineers in new senior roles: cosplaying harder ambition, disappearing into secret overwork, burning out, then damaging trust. His antidote is to drop a level—become the greatest teammate first.
4 min · 993 words
From Stonemasons to CarpentersSoftware development in the age of AI
Michael Hilton compares software work under AI to formwork carpenters versus stonemasons: agents shape temporary structure while humans still own the permanent craft of deciding what to build and verifying it holds.
4 min · 968 words
How SpaceX Streamlined the Raptor Engine
Brian Potter walks through Raptor 1→3: how SpaceX deleted sensors and flanges, internalized plumbing with 3D printing, and cut vehicle-side heat-shield mass while raising thrust—and where complexity merely moved inside.
15 min · 3,366 words
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, writing for Computer Weekly’s 60th anniversary, reflects on invisible engineering—the reliability work that only becomes visible when it fails—and what two decades at Amazon taught him about building systems that fade into the background.
8 min · 1,907 words
The Model Is the Engine. The Harness Makes It Reliable.
Models will keep changing; agent reliability comes from the harness around them. Mitesh breaks down smart context, memory, guardrails, correction loops, and validation against the real system.
7 min · 1,506 words
The Job Is No Longer Writing Code
AI coding agents automate well-specified implementation work; the remaining job is coordination, specification, and decision quality—and most orgs have not restructured for that shift.
8 min · 1,877 words