Commentary

A colleague told me something recently that I keep thinking about. She said, unprompted, that she appreciated seeing both sides of my AI conversations. Not just the output. The full thread. My prompts, the AI’s responses, the back and forth, the dead ends, the iterations. She said it made her trust me more. This piece […]

ChatGPT has been publicly available for over three years now, and generative AI is woven into the tools students use every day: web search, word processors, code editors. You might assume that by now, most programming instructors have figured out how to handle it. But when my collaborators and I went looking for computing instructors

Enterprise AI governance still authorizes agents as if they were stable software artifacts.They are not. An enterprise deploys a LangChain-based research agent to analyze market trends and draft internal briefs. During preproduction review, the system behaves within acceptable bounds: It routes queries to approved data sources, expresses uncertainty appropriately in ambiguous cases, and maintains source

The following article originally appeared on the Asimov’s Addendum Substack and is being republished here with the author’s permission. A rambling response to what Claude itself deemed a “straightforward query” with clear formatting requirements. Are LLMs reliable? LLMs have built up a reputation for being unreliable.1 Small changes in the input can lead to massive

The following article originally appeared on “Dan Shapiro’s blog” and is being reposted here with the author’s permission. Companies are now producing dark factories—engines that turn specs into shipping software. The implementations can be complex and sometimes involve Mad Max metaphors. But they don’t have to be like that. If you want a five-minute factory,

The following article originally appeared on “Dan Shapiro’s blog” and is being reposted here with the author’s permission. Companies are now producing dark factories—engines that turn specs into shipping software. The implementations can be complex and sometimes involve Mad Max metaphors. But they don’t have to be like that. If you want a five-minute factory,

We all read it in the daily news. The New York Times reports that economists who once dismissed the AI job threat are now taking it seriously. In February, Jack Dorsey cut 40% of Block’s workforce, telling shareholders that “intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company.” Block’s stock rose

The following article was originally published on Tim O’Brien’s Medium page and is being reposted here with the author’s permission. If you’ve spent any time around AI-assisted software work, you already know the moment when the Scope Creep Kraken first puts a tentacle on the boat. The project begins with a real goal and, usually, a sensible

This is the third article in a series on agentic engineering and AI-driven development. Read part one here, part two here, part three here, and look for the next article on April 23 on O’Reilly Radar. Here’s the dirty secret of the AI coding revolution: most experienced developers still don’t really trust the code the AI writes for