automation
Engineers Automate So They Can Do the Hard Part
AI tools now write a large share of everyday code, and software developer job postings are still rising, as CNBC reported this week. If a machine does the typing, why would anyone hire more people to do the job? The question assumes that the job was the typing. Camille Fournier, who has managed engineers at…
The Map Runs Out Where the Work Begins
Give a person the chance to spend most of the workday on what they are already good at, and the odds they show up fully engaged jump roughly sixfold. The finding is old, replicated, and quietly ignored by nearly every organization that has read it. We nod at it in a slide deck, then go…
The Agent Can Buy. It Cannot Yet Be Held To It.
A machine can now hold a card, choose a vendor, and settle the bill without a human hand on the transaction. Not in a lab. In production. Visa and Mastercard each shipped a way for an autonomous agent to carry a credential and spend against it, and Stripe handed developers a toolkit so their agents…
The Agent Doesn’t Just Help You Work. It Decides What’s Worth Building.
Somewhere right now, an engineering team is weighing a move off a language built for resilience, one famous for keeping thousands of processes alive while parts of the system fail, toward a more ordinary one they like less. Not because the new language is better. Because their AI coding tools are better at it. The…
The Quiet Power to Decide What Gets Built
Somewhere right now there is an engineering team that has spent a decade building on Erlang. It is a language famous for one thing: keeping programs alive. Phone networks run on it. It was designed so that one part of a system can fall over and the rest keeps humming. That kind of resilience is…
Eight Hours, A Hundred Pages, and the Quiet Problem of Too Much
A research agent from Sakana AI now writes a hundred-page report in eight hours. Not an outline. Not a draft for a human to finish. VentureBeat’s write-up of an ultra deep research agent that produces hundred-page reports in eight hours describes a finished document: sourced, structured, the kind of thing a consulting team used to…
The Day the Tools Got a Wallet
For a long time the deal with software was simple. It told you things. You did them. The spreadsheet ran the numbers; you decided what to buy. The map showed the route; you turned the wheel. The line between knowing and doing stayed clean, and the machine stayed on the knowing side of it. This…