Tag: software-engineering
All the articles with the tag "software-engineering".
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Surviving the Context Window in Practice
The context window is a budget, not a feature. Auto-compaction hides the bill until the agent starts hallucinating. Practical tactics for staying under budget: scope per session, offload to disk, dispatch subagents for research, and clear aggressively between phases. The goal isn't a bigger window; it's needing less of it.
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The Only Workflow That Works
AI agents amplify whatever engineering process they're given. Bad specs produce confident garbage at machine speed. Three practitioner workflows for separating planning from execution: the normal coding flow, Boris Tane's annotated plan cycle, and Jamon Holmgren's Night Shift spec discipline. The pattern is simple; the discipline is resisting the urge to skip straight to implementation.
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AI Is an Exoskeleton, Not a Coworker
A rigorous study found AI-assisted developers are 19% slower yet believe they're 24% faster. The gap reveals that AI is best understood as an exoskeleton — amplifying human judgment rather than replacing it — and that the real risk isn't bad code but cognitive debt from velocity without understanding.
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Code Is Cheap Now, And That Changes Everything
AI coding agents have made code production nearly free. Drawing on insights from Kent Beck, Paul Ford, and Simon Willison, this post argues that the value has shifted from writing code to defining systems — contracts, invariants, SLAs, and verification.
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A Practitioner's Guide to AI-Assisted Development
The journey from AI-sceptic to agent-native isn't a smooth ramp — it's a series of uncomfortable jumps. This post maps the stages of AI-assisted development and identifies three critical fulcrums where developers get stuck.