Software engineering

Always-on agents run production without the on-call tax — Justin Smith, Resolve AI

Always-on agents run production without the on-call tax — Justin Smith, Resolve AI

Justin Smith from Resolve AI discusses how AI agents address the increasing operational burden on engineers, highlighting that 70% of an engineer's time is spent running code. He introduces Resolve AI's background agents, which autonomously monitor deployments, perform health checks, generate reports, and answer engineering questions by leveraging deep production context and a self-learning knowledge system, effectively reducing the "on-call tax" and managing system complexity.

Benchmarking Coding Agents on New vs Legacy Codebases — Denys Linkov, Wisedocs

Benchmarking Coding Agents on New vs Legacy Codebases — Denys Linkov, Wisedocs

Denys Linkov details Wisedocs' journey of refactoring a complex, distributed ML pipeline into a monorepo, benchmarking the process against evolving AI coding tools. He honestly audits whether the six-month effort was justified, or if waiting for more advanced AI would have been better, ultimately concluding that the significant social and technical benefits made the refactor a successful strategic move despite current LLM limitations.

A Long Spring: 19 Years of Living with Your Past Mistakes • Arjen Poutsma • GOTO 2025

A Long Spring: 19 Years of Living with Your Past Mistakes • Arjen Poutsma • GOTO 2025

Arjen Poutsma, a Spring Framework veteran, reflects on 19 years of evolving the framework. He shares insights on API design from XML to functional programming, detailing anecdotes like bubble sort in MVC and the challenges of HTTP method enums. Poutsma emphasizes the critical role of diversity, empathy, humility, and restraint in open-source stewardship to maintain developer trust and foster innovation under constraints.

Benchmarks: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly — Ali Khial, G2i

Benchmarks: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly — Ali Khial, G2i

Ali Khial exposes critical flaws in popular coding benchmarks, revealing how ambiguous instructions, weak verifiers, and model 'reward hacking' create a disconnect between reported performance and real-world utility. He argues that this leads to a "trust gap" where engineers disregard leaderboards. Khial then outlines five principles for building trustworthy, production-grade benchmarks, emphasizing human-authored instructions, holistic grading, economic value, contamination-free design, and informative leaderboards, urging software engineers to contribute to their improvement.

Developer Productivity at a Developer Productivity Startup • Robert-Jan "RJ" Huijsman • GOTO 2025

Developer Productivity at a Developer Productivity Startup • Robert-Jan "RJ" Huijsman • GOTO 2025

Robert-Jan Huijsman, Founding Engineer at Reboot.dev, outlines a pragmatic approach to developer productivity by tackling friction and non-determinism in both human collaboration and software development. He shares Reboot.dev's strategies, including async workstreams, full-stack typing, unit testing with AI, and foundational engineering principles like retries, durable execution, and strong consistency, to build reliable and efficient systems.

How Forward Deployed Engineering is done at Kepler — Vinoo Ganesh

How Forward Deployed Engineering is done at Kepler — Vinoo Ganesh

Vinoo Ganesh, formerly of Palantir, details how Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) functions as a critical product strategy rather than a sales role. He shares insights from Palantir's Foundry development, emphasizing how FDEs embed with customers to uncover true problems, observe user behavior, define a common linguistic ontology, and build production-ready solutions from temporary fixes, ultimately driving core product leverage.