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 · last mo.

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 · 2mo 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 · 2mo 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...

I miss whiteboards

Chesterton's Fence and the Doorman Fallacy says hi 👋

Gergely Orosz@gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 2mo ago

We see that AI tools amplify good engineering cultures, and bad. So it is rational to better the engineering culture at any and all organizations. Good (engineering) middle management is pretty good at doing this. So why are so many companies gutting middle management, and now?

i wrote a post about the growing divide between AI skeptics and AI enthusiasts. wins and costs are both real, but too often fall on different groups of people. when you're only experiencing half the story, it's too easy to write each other off. charitydotwtf.substack.com/p/ai-enthusi...

AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy

Both sides are grappling with a real existential threat, and both sides feel like they are screaming into the void. Here's how to close the gap and get everyone pulling in the same direction.

charitydotwtf.substack.com

This is absolutely nuts: hackers are hijacking high-profile Instagram accounts by simply asking Meta's AI chatbot to change the email on the account. Meta's AI does it, hacker gets password reset code, they're in. A staggering security issue www.404media.co/hackers-simp...

Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked

The exploit shows the extreme risk of offloading technical support to AI.

404media.co

Not an Arsenal fan, my son is. 2 days in North London - going wild night and day. Hundreds of 1000s lining streets today. Not a single hint of any trouble or violence (whilst Paris, on the other hand). But yeah, London is this really dangerous city...

It is often said that a “wave” or “tsunami” of technological change is heading our way. These metaphors are powerful because they shape our sense of what is reasonable, and what is unreasonable. What does AI as a "wave" imply is a reasonable course of action? (1/...)

A senior engineer, three years deep helping lead AI augmented coding adoption in ~4000 engineer organisation, writing honestly about their experiences. Very good and worth a read. jamiehurst.co.uk/2026-05-24_a...

My latest books cartoon for @theguardian.com. Many more here: www.theguardian.com/profile/tom-gauld

Uber COO Andrew Macdonald said he's not seeing proportional productivity gains from increasing AI costs. https://bit.ly/4vdizCZ

Uber's COO says it's getting harder to justify the money spent on AI tokenmaxxing

Operations chief Andrew Macdonald said he's not seeing proportional productivity gains from increasing AI costs within Uber.

businessinsider.com

Cloudflare's just announced the B Ark. Hope nobody at HQ touches a dirty telephone.

Dare Obasanjo@carnage4life.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Cloudflare’s CEO explains why despite over 30% revenue growth, they are laying off 20% of staff. He argues that there are 3 types of workers; builders, sellers and measurers (middle managers, legal, HR, operations, etc). AI makes it possible to automate the last group and he expects everyone will

Some of the same people who benefited from riding the ZIRP wave to safer places of leadership are now waxing, not very poetically, about flattening orgs, 10x engineers, getting into the details, reducing bureaucracy, and getting closer to the work. cutlefish.substack.com/p/ai-wont-sa...

AI Won’t Save the Kingdoms We Built

This post is about the people who built the fiefdoms now looking to AI to save them from the fiefdoms, and why that will only work if we are honest about what those fiefdoms were built to avoid in the...

cutlefish.substack.com

One person getting AI to write quality code when they know how to build what they’re building is doable. Consistently getting AI to do that at scale for a whole bunch of people who don’t know how to build what they want? Totally different problem.