Field Signal · Curated Reading
The Engineering
Signal.
High-signal field notes, architecture teardowns, and engineering writing from 50 publications. A focused reading queue for becoming a stronger end-to-end engineer. Updated 20 Aug.
The Pulse: Antigravity 2.0 takes ‘IDE’ out of its new IDE
Feedback about the redesigned IDE is overwhelmingly negative due to bugs, poor UX & model support, and eating through Gemini token quotas. Also: a clue that Antigravity’s own devs use other tools for their work?
Fragments: June 2
Greg Wilson has noticed that lots of folks are using dodgy metrics to figure out if AI tools are worth their costs. Would you measure lines of code generated, or tickets closed? Or would you send out a survey asking whether developers feel more productive? Each of those approaches is flawed in a dif...
Fragments: May 27
At the GOTO Conference in Copenhagen in 2025, Kent Beck and I spent some time on stage talking and answering questions from the audience - a format I refer to as “two old geezers on a park bench”. We talk about our experiences with LLM-augmented programming (at that point - October 2025), we show ou...
The test suite as a regression sensor
Birgitta Böckeler finishes her post on sensors for coding agents by examining the role of a test suite as a regression sensor, focusing on the role mutation testing can play. more…
The VibeSec Reckoning
Vibe coding has significantly accelerated software prototyping but AI agents frequently recommend insecure configurations, creating security problems. Gautam Koul, Lucian Moss, Neil Drew-Lopez, and Daberechi Ruth Edeokoh share their experience while building applications for Thoughtworks's global ma...
The Pulse: Forward deployed engineering heats up again
Massive demand for the role at Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The latest version of the FDE role looks like the consultant / solution architect role done by many early-junior engineers.
Bliki: Vibe Coding
Vibe coding is building a software application by prompting an LLM, telling it what to build, trying it out, prompting for changes - but without looking at any of the code that the LLM generates. This technique can be used by people without any knowledge of programming. However the resulting softwar...
Three more static code analysis sensors
Birgitta Böckeler adds discussion of three more sensors for static code analysis, focusing on checking and enforcing better modularity. Computational sensors for dependency checks were good at enforcing rules, but the rules were limited. Building a computational sensor for coupling data proved lackl...
Google Cloud deletes Australian trading fund’s infra
A $124B fund in Australia would have lost all data stored with Google Cloud, had they not relied on a third-party backup. A rare blunder from GCP, where regional replication did not stop the deletion – and a just as rare statement from Google Cloud’s CEO taking the blame.
Maintainability sensors for coding agents
In her recent article about harness engineering for coding agent users, Birgitta Böckeler laid out a mental model for expanding a coding agent harness: a system of guides and sensors that increase the probability of good agent outputs and enable self-correction before issues reach human eyes. Birgit...
Fragments: May 14
Last week I spent a day at The Orchard Retreat, hosted by Mechanical Orchard. that brought together several people working in software development to talk about the profession’s future with the rise of agentic programming. The event was help under the Chatham House Rule, so I can’t attribute the com...
The Pulse: Did capacity shortages turn Anthropic hostile to devs?
For the past few weeks, Anthropic has continually upset devs with its “dumber” model, and by removing Claude Code access from some paid accounts. After securing lots of compute from SpaceX, could the reason have been to conceal capacity issues?
Bliki: Interrogatory LLM
When we need an LLM to perform a complex task, we often need to feed it a lot of context. Coming up with a design for a new feature requires descriptions of how we want the feature to appear to the user, guidelines on how it should be implemented, information on external systems to consult, and so o...
TechPays has been acquired by Levels.fyi
tl;dr: TechPays is joining Levels.fyi : so the leading tech salary site in Europe gets the love and care it deserves. Thanks to Zsombor for building this project with me for so many years. Pay transparency has always been an issue in tech, especially in Europe. For a while,
What is Code
Increasingly humans delegate writing code to agents. Will there even be source code in the future? To wrestle with this question, we have to understand what code is. Unmesh Joshi sees code as having two distinct but intertwined purposes: instructions to a machine and a conceptual model of the proble...
The Pulse: AI load breaks GitHub – why not other vendors?
GitHub’s leadership blames the 3.5x increase in service load as the cause of degradation – or it might be self-inflicted.
Fragments: May 5
Over the last couple of months Rahul Garg published a series of posts here on how to reduce the friction in AI-assisted programming. To make it easier to put these ideas into practice he’s now built an open-source framework to operationalize these patterns. AI coding assistants jump straight to code...
Bliki: Mythical Man Month
In the early 1960s, Fred Brooks managed the development of IBM's System/360 computer systems. After it was done he penned his thoughts in the book The Mythical Man-Month which became one of the most influential books on software development after its publication in 1975. Reading it in 2026, we'll fi...
Fragments: April 29
Chris Parsons has updated his guide on using AI to code. This is his third update, what I like about it is that he gives a lot of concrete information about how he uses AI, with sufficient detail that we can learn from him. His advice also resonates with the better advice I’ve seen out there, so the...
Structured-Prompt-Driven Development (SPDD)
LLM programming assistants have demonstrated considerable value, but mostly with individual developers. The internal IT organization in Thoughtworks has been using them for their teams and have developed a method and workflow called Structured Prompt-Driven Development (SPDD). Wei Zhang and Jessie J...
Alan Turing play in Cambridge MA
Last night I saw Central Square Theater’s excellent production of Breaking the Code. It’s about Alan Turing, who made a monumental contribution to both my profession and the fate of free democracies. Well worth seeing if you’re in the Boston area this month.