Insights
Insights.
Practical notes on software engineering in the agentic era: working with coding agents, building dependable products and evolving the systems people rely on.
Gardening the codebase
Coding agents now write much of my code. So what’s left for me to do? Tending the garden that code grows in, and pulling the weeds.Read the articleHow many test cases is enough?
Is trying a dozen examples enough before shipping an AI feature? Not even close. Here’s how many cases you need, and which ones to pick.Read the articleWhy busy teams are slow
Keeping everyone busy feels efficient, but queueing math says it makes delivery slower. Here’s why, and what I’d change in how teams plan their work.Read the articleWhy agents fail at long tasks
An agent that nails a 3-step demo can fall apart on 20 steps. Here’s the arithmetic behind it, and the two levers I use to make agents reliable.Read the articleHow to replace a system without stopping it
Big-bang rewrites put all the risk on one weekend. Here’s how I’d replace a legacy system piece by piece, while the business keeps running on it.Read the article
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