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Angel Espinoza borrows Jeffrey Katzenberg’s “it’s not the how, it’s the why” line from Hollywood and applies it to civil engineering work with coding agents—agents change the how, not the purpose.
2 min · 388 words
Software Goldilocks: the market for software is expanding but is the System of Record dead?
Sam Gerstenzang argues AI expands SaaS spend while splitting value into small opinionated point tools and large full-service “does the work” products—squeezing classic mid-market systems of record from both sides.
2 min · 520 words
Generation Got Cheaper Again. Verification Didn't.
O'Side Systems on the growing gap between cheap AI code generation and slow human verification: cost per accepted change, review queues, and where engineering leaders should invest next.
5 min · 1,218 words
What I believe about the future of software development
Thorsten Ball plants a flag on where software development is headed as AI agents write more of the code: what still matters for engineers, what gets commoditized, and how taste and judgment become the scarce skills.
4 min · 809 words
What makes software development engineeringA process that doesn't depend on individual brilliance
Simon Park (박성범) argues software work becomes engineering when processes outlast individual brilliance—translating intuition into explainable practice, and clarifying when an engineering approach is actually needed.
12 min · 2,720 words
“They had no concept of a duty of care to their users.”
Marcin Wichary reflects on software craft and quality through the lens of duty of care to users—drawing on design and tooling history to ask what it means when products treat people as afterthoughts.
3 min · 664 words
I listened to the recent Ezra Klein interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, which seems to be something of a Rorschach test for AI doomerism: if you are inclined to see doom, Jensen sounds dismissive, but if you (like me) do not fear for the future of humanity at the (metaphorical!) hands of a computer program, Jensen’s responses seem very reasonable. (With some exception: does this guy really not
3 min · 748 words
The Normalization of Inexplicable Failures
A critique of software and systems that routinely fail in ways nobody can explain—and how we've come to treat opaque breakage as normal rather than a design failure.
4 min · 942 words
Can we have reachability properties in TLA⁺?
Andrew Helwer asks whether TLA⁺ can express reachability properties the way model checkers often do, and explores what it would take to add them without breaking TLA⁺'s temporal-logic foundations.
12 min · 2,733 words
Getting out of the way: my robotics crash course
Software engineer Rob Bercik documents a crash course with a desktop robot arm: why LLM-era builders should get out of the way, what broke first, and what physical loops taught him.
8 min · 1,842 words
Arm & SoftBank: Part 1 — Masa comes calling, bearing gifts
Today, something a little different: a joint post in the form of a conversation between Jon Metzler and Babbage.
11 min · 2,555 words
Crazy as it sounds to say this, since it’s all anybody’s been able to talk about for over a year, but the impact of AI on computing hasn’t yet sunk in.
6 min · 1,349 words
Is Structured Human Input the Missing Link in Agentic Work?
Long-running agents pause unpredictably for human input. Ben Greenberg argues A2A’s input-required state needs a schema contract—not free-form text—so pauses become reliable handoffs.
3 min · 801 words
Agentics: what is developer process automation?
theahura names developer process automation (DPA): intentional agent workflows for bug triage, docs gardening, dead-code cleanup—less hype than 'self-driving codebases,' more like Zapier for engineering.
6 min · 1,268 words
Harness Engineering Explained: The System Around an AI Coding Agent
Harness Engineering Explained: The System Around an AI Coding Agent The same coding agent gives one team clean merges and another a pile of reopened tickets. The difference is rarely the model. It's the six parts around it, checked one ticket at a time.
11 min · 2,490 words
Michael Heap on why leaders asking for “reasonable explanations” can stall change: good stories aren’t fixes, process theater replaces outcomes, and trust depends on asking the right question instead of drowning in details.
4 min · 845 words
LA Metro has some of the slowest escalators on Earth
If you’ve ridden an escalator in Hong Kong or Singapore, the climb out of an LA Metro station can feel painfully slow. It’s really not just Metro though, American transit escalators generally operate under a much lower speed limit than those in much of the world. Why? Well honestly we don’t have the whole answer, but we did look at the rules governing escalators in 139 cities across 58 countries and came to some interesting conclusions. One of them is that LA Metro’s specified speed is below the maximum allowed in every single city on our list. That doesn’t mean we…
4 min · 815 words
Sunil Sadasivan on first-principles thinking for senior engineers working with AI agents: set experience aside long enough to see the problem clearly, then rebuild judgment on top of how agents actually work.
3 min · 624 words
Loris Cro reflects on Zigtoberfest remarks: approaching Zig as a multi-year journey across newcomers, intermediate, and advanced users—and what that framing means for the language and community.
4 min · 1,028 words
Agent-Centric Development Workflow
Yunlong Liu proposes redesigning implementation, CI, and code review around autonomous coding agents—replacing human-paced PR loops with agent-first gates, verification, and review patterns for the agentic era.
3 min · 752 wordsagent-assisted