My god, I am TIRED of orgs constantly doing this pendulum swing. 25+ yrs in the industry, some things never change www.techradar.com/pro/meta-is-...

Meta is begging some employees to step up and become managers again

Meta wants more managers for its AI work

techradar.com

“But how did the superintelligence gain access to all of our infrastructure and private data!?” “You’d never guess it, but we gave it privileged access to all of our infrastructure and private data.”

Rob Bowley@robbowley.net · yesterday

Half my feed is AI doom takes, when the risk most of us actually face in the near future is not a rogue superintelligence.

Half my feed is AI doom takes, when the risk most of us actually face in the near future is not a rogue superintelligence.

Hard relate

Opusfived

Make one button blue. Change nothing else. A short interactive comedy about agentic AI assistants that can never just do the thing.

opusfived.dev

Interesting article, I've seen a few articles recently from experienced XP background type folks saying they're dropping lower level TDD in favour of more outside in acceptance/E2E test driven approach

Practices I Abandoned with Agents: An Ode to Test-Driven Development

After 25 years with TDD, we are now parting ways. The incremental TDD steps were great for human cognition, but didn't survive the transition to agentic coding.

adamtornhill.substack.com

Really interesting article I just came across. Automating part of programming isn't new, and it has never removed a phase - the work gets absorbed and moves. It's about the 1950s, but the authors draw the line straight to AI coding today.

Rachel's Ramblings: Maybe We Shouldn't Be Reviewing All This Code: Or, perhaps the problem isn't that AI has broken code review, maybe it’s that we've been using code review to solve the wrong problems martinfowler.com/rachels-ramb...

Maybe We Shouldn't Be Reviewing All This Code

Or, perhaps the problem isn't that AI has broken code review, maybe it’s that we've been using code review to solve the wrong problems

martinfowler.com

Only taken 25+ yrs of domesticity to learn non-stick pans a complete waste of money Spend a fortune on fancy Le Creuset, still landfill in 5yrs Get quality stainless steel, can scrub with wire wool, stick in dishwasher, will last a lifetime + not had issues with stuff sticking if pre-heat properly

CGI in movies peaked with Jurassic Park. Can't think of a heavily CGI movie I rate since. Watching Gladiator 2 coz on Netflix, first scene haeavily CGI boat battle, is just meh.

Write-up on the giga-outage and more from GitHub. Every chart I have seen internally too is literally doing a hockeystick on growth. IMHO this is also a canary in the coalmine for many other systems and products who have an API github.blog/news-insight...

The August 17 outage, and the work ahead

An update on the August 17 outage and the steps we're taking to improve reliability.

github.blog

I wrote an essay about why I'm done using AI for coding, even if it costs me my job and career: brettcodes.com/im-done-usin... The basic gist is: AI made me a worse, apathetic programmer. I think it's bad for humanity, the planet, and the craft of software engineering. And I'm done using it.

I'm done using AI

Why I'm stopping using AI for coding (and anything else) after using it earnestly for a year and coming to understand the harms it causes on personal, societal, and environmental levels.

brettcodes.com

I go on holiday for a few weeks and we've already moved on from Loop Engineering to Graph Engineering The half-life of a paradigm is getting shorter than my annual leave My prediction: neuro-symbolic engineering by the end of August, at which point we'll have gone full circle and reinvented Prolog

Okay then. Folks have been asking, and it seems a shame to waste 3 1/2 years of legwork, so I'm scheduling one Code Craft & AI workshop. Tues Sept 1st - 18:45 - 21:00 BST £99 + VAT Plus you get a copy of my book-in-progress, The AI-Ready Software Developer www.tickettailor.com/events/codem...

Register – Code Craft & AI – Zoom

Code Craft & AI – Zoom, Tue 1 Sep 2026 - Tuesday Sept 1st 18:45 BST £99 + UK VAT Large-scale studies by the DevOps Research & Assessment group, CircleCI, Faros and others show an undeniable pictu...

tickettailor.com

I had never thought about it like this - code didn't matter before but it does now because the computers depend on it not humans - but now put this way it makes total sense. Is this a good thing? Dunno davidwhitney.co.uk/blog/2026/07...

Computers Finally Care About Code · David Whitney

David Whitney is a technologist, software architect, conference speaker and author based in London. Available for talks and corporate bookings.

davidwhitney.co.uk

Heron House, the (temp) home for No 10 North, I know well. It's the home of the DiSH start up accelerator and event space I've been to many times, as well GCHQ Also the home of the birth, death marriages registration office - always nice seeing new little babies and newlyweds when visiting!

Whitehall officials offered move to No 10 North in Manchester

London-based civil servants willing to move north have been told they will be offered relocation packages, the BBC understands.

bbc.co.uk

I was speaking to a friend, an in-house commercial lawyer, about their use of AI legal tools. Said they're using them a lot and v good if you're an experienced lawyer, though not cheap at £3-5k per seat. Main benefit = needing to rely less on external firms, which I'd heard elsewhere too But... 1/3

Interesting titbit I learned today. Sales industry had largely rolled back from using AI agent SDRs (sales dev reps) after finding they spammed leads with low quality outbound and finding themselves getting blacklisted/blocked.

5,000 engineers weren't 'replaced by AI' - it was a gradual general headcount reduction since 2020, mainly due to the EV shift. They lost veterans and institutional knowledge as a result. Companies have ended up in situations like this for decades via offshoring and cost-cutting.

Dare Obasanjo@carnage4life.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Ford has rehired hundreds of senior engineers after replacing them with AI backfired and has cost the company billions of dollars. AI adoption is blamed for Ford being the most recalled automaker in the U.S. with 51 recalls covering over 11 million vehicles in the first half of 2026 alone.

Anyway, my theory - FWIW - is that lots of the experienced and senior people who are hooked on LLMs are actually having a midlife crisis, and that spending money on Claude is cheaper than buying a Lambo buttondown.com/justenoughin...

The Sports Car Theory of LLM Adoption

If LLMs make decision makers feel stupid, maybe they'll stop using them?

buttondown.com

I'm in the grip of about 10000 massive deadlines, so I've obviously spent this morning writing a newsletter about a topic that is completely and utterly tangential buttondown.com/justenoughin...

The Sports Car Theory of LLM Adoption

If LLMs make decision makers feel stupid, maybe they'll stop using them?

buttondown.com

"We're accumulating code faster than we're accumulating trust." Code you can fix. Trust evaporates in an instant and doesn't come back. XP was a trust factory. Every practice that builds it makes you trustworthy. Vibe coding removes those moments: newsletter.kentbeck.com/p/trust-fact...

Who's old enough to remember dress down Fridays? 🤚

alright friends and computationists, what are the signals you pick up on that make you think a team has high engineering discipline? (whatever "high" means to you) i'm not talking science or evidence. i'm talking casual conversation, heuristics, no evidence whatsoever, just radar. what trips it?

Great as always from @charity.wtf . One bit that struck me: "as good as the median engineer." It's a low bar - most engineers are mediocre. They've previously passed as competent because speed of output stood in for skill. 1/2

Charity Majors@charity.wtf · 3mo ago

I think AI is the best opening we've ever had to bring our engineering values to the mainstream, instead of the top single-digit-percent of teams it's always been. But nondeterminism will take more engineering discipline. Not less. charitydotwtf.substack.com/p/ai-demands...

A huge thank you to everyone who's bought tickets over the last 2 days. Just a quick reminder that the special offers end at midnight tonight. Save ~£30 on out-of-hours workshops, and 25x that on the 3-day Code Craft workshop.

Jason Gorman@jasongorman.bsky.social · 3mo ago

So it's out there that - with great sadness - I'm winding down my training business & looking for a new challenge But it's not quite over yet. I have 3 *final* workshops for developers (and, in one case, non-devs, too) coming up - all on special offer 2day codemanship.wordpress.com/2026/06/04/a...

Very interesting @jburnmurdoch.ft.com piece this morning - how much value AI is creating is exactly the right question. The evidence from coders here suggests it’s so far creating a lot of extra output - 290% more files, 30% more software releases - but no extra valuable outputs (app downloads)

How much value is AI really creating?

Eye-opening changes to the speed and volume of work are not always translating into genuine productivity

giftarticle.ft.com

The rise of AI App-slop. Or slopapps, perhaps. www.ft.com/content/8e9a...