Impressions from visiting OpenAI, Anthropic, & Cursor

A peek into where software engineering is headed from inside the sector’s leading AI labs. Agents running in the cloud are a major trend, while coding harnesses are spreading beyond the craft

Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t

Coding agents as normal technology

How building software is changing at Anthropic

A deepdive on what’s changed in how the leading AI lab makes software. Ever more code review and testing is done by AI, two-pizza teams very much alive, and more. Details from inside of Anthropic

Digital Construction Week | Innovation in the built environment

The UK’s leading event for innovation and technology in the built environment. Explore the latest developments in digital construction.

X : What are you interested in? Me : Wow, that varies constantly. Right now? There are a number of topics that I'm actively pursuing … a) When we talk about software engineering we typically think… | Simon Wardley

X : What are you interested in? Me : Wow, that varies constantly. Right now? There are a number of topics that I'm actively pursuing … a) When we talk about software engineering we typically think about the active part of creating code but software development is currently practised as a craft not an engineering discipline. The only engineering discipline in software engineering is testing. This creates a flaw in the comparison with using AI to code because development itself has never been optimised. If all we have to do is write code and we can automate that part then we can just replace those expensive typists with LLMs but development should be, and has the capability to become an engineering discipline. It's just not that for now. https://lnkd.in/eSRprhbf b) Most people talking digital sovereignty are doing so with good intentions but they literally have no idea what they are talking about. This is not because they are daft or foolish but because they cannot see the environment they are talking about. They are like generals talking about territorial sovereignty with no idea of what territory is or how you represent it. https://lnkd.in/eku2X_Ea c) Architectural decisions are made in code and not in the diagrams we create. Those architectural diagrams are more like prompts, wishes and beliefs of what a system should be but rarely reflect the actual system. This creates additional problems when the real architectural decisions are made by coders but coding itself is a craft not an engineering discipline. d) The current crop of LLMs / LMMs are driving us towards a new theocracy. We can counter this through diversity, critical thinking and open approaches but that does mean we have to get to the point of all symbolic instructions being open. That includes the training data. Copyright is a distraction from the real issue that we don't know what the systems are being trained on. Guardrails are a post event kludge. https://lnkd.in/exJVmNvD e) The medium we use in conversational programming environments such as cursor and lovable (or what we call vibe coding when not looking at the code or Software Engineering + AI when looking at the code) appear to be flawed. We are focused on text not images. The change of medium changes the conversation, the corollary is the conversation we have around the screen and the one we have around the whiteboard. Same problem, different medium, different discussion. https://lnkd.in/e_W6b6z3 f) "Value" in consulting land is mostly theatre rather than something meaningful. There are many forms of value but often we fail to identify this, quantify it or even measure it. https://lnkd.in/eeNbR_VY g) Rewilding Software Engineering. To change software development into an engineering practice, we need to introduce two wolves - one that software engineering is a decision making process and secondly that we need to build tools for problems we are facing - https://lnkd.in/epyUnqgh

AI-assisted engineers are burning out, is this fine?—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog

AI-assisted code generation is not free. It comes with a hidden cost: burnout. Are we dangerously ignorant to this problem? And how can we cope with it? In this post, we discuss this question.

Boulder AI Builders

Come meet the people building interesting products with AI in Boulder.

Builder.ai did not “fake AI with 700 engineers”

The claim that the AI startup “faked AI” with hundreds of engineers went viral – and I also fell for it, initially. The reality is much more sobering: Builder.ai built a code generator on top of Claude and other LLMs; it did not build a so-called “Mechanical Turk.”

The Future Worth Building Is Human

AI built for autonomy crowds people out, making us passive observers of what’s coming. We’re building toward a different future.

Developers say AI coding tools work—and that's precisely what worries them

Ars spoke to several software devs about AI and found enthusiasm tempered by unease.