This is the second article in a series on agentic engineering and AI-driven development. Read part one here, and look for the next article on April 2 on O’Reilly Radar. The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts […]
The following article originally appeared on Angie Jones’s website and is being republished here with the author’s permission. I’ve been seeing more and more open source maintainers throwing up their hands over AI-generated pull requests. Going so far as to stop accepting PRs from external contributors. If you’re an open source maintainer, you’ve felt this […]
Dark web forum posts mentioned the phrase “AI agent” far more in the second half of 2025 than in the first half. Could this mean that fraudsters are charmed by the AI hype? Or is AI truly a game changer for cybercrime? AI-related discussions—evident both in what “the bad guys” are saying and in what […]
On March 26, Addy Osmani and I are hosting the third O’Reilly AI Codecon, and this time we’re taking on the question of what software craftsmanship looks like when AI agents are writing much of the code. The subtitle of this event, “Software Craftsmanship in the Age of AI,” was meant to be provocative. Craftsmanship […]
A few years into the AI shift, the gap between engineers is not talent. It’s coordination: shared norms and a shared language for how AI fits into everyday engineering work. Some teams are already getting real value. They’ve moved beyond one-off experiments and started building repeatable ways of working with AI. Others haven’t, even when […]
My “Live with Tim” conversation with Steve Yegge this week was one of those sessions where you could imagine the audience leaning forward in their chairs. And on more than one occasion, when Steve got particularly colorful, I imagined them recoiling. Steve has always been one of the most provocative thinkers in our industry, going […]
In November 2025, Austrian developer Peter Steinberger published a weekend project called Clawdbot. You could text it on Telegram or WhatsApp, and it would do things for you: manage your calendar, triage your email, run scripts, and even browse the web. By late January 2026, it had exploded. It gained 25,000 GitHub stars in a […]
Autonomous AI systems force architects into an uncomfortable question that cannot be avoided much longer: Does every decision need to be governed synchronously to be safe? At first glance, the answer appears obvious. If AI systems reason, retrieve information, and act autonomously, then surely every step should pass through a control plane to ensure correctness, […]
I’ve said in the past that AI will enable new kinds of applications—but I’ve never had the imagination to guess what those new applications would be. I don’t want a smart refrigerator, especially if it’s going to inflict ads on me. Or a smart TV. Or a smart doorbell. Most of these applications are silly, […]
Our previous article framed the Model Context Protocol (MCP) as the toolbox that provides AI agents tools and Agent Skills as materials that teach AI agents how to complete tasks. This is different from pre- or posttraining, which determine a model’s general behavior and expertise. Agent Skills do not “train” agents. They soft-fork agent behavior […]