AGENTS.md Is the Wrong Conversation The AI industry is in specification-mode. How should agents communicate? What should the protocol look like? How do you define a standard so that agents built by different organizations can interoperate? There are frameworks, working groups, proposals for standardization. The energy is palpable. Finally, we're going to solve the agent […]
Agent Observability: Monitoring and Understanding Agents at Internet Scale When you build software that runs on the scale Google operates at, the usual rules stop applying. You're not debugging a single request. You're managing millions of simultaneous decision-making processes, each one making autonomous choices, each one capable of cascading failures you won't see until they've […]
Legacy Software + Agentic Discovery Legacy codebases are nightmares in the truest sense. Thousands of lines of code written by people who've left. Business logic embedded in places it has no right to be. Dependencies no one fully understands. Documentation that's either nonexistent or spectacularly out of date. When you need to change something, you're […]
When a Small Language Model Beat Our LLM in Production: Right-Sizing Your Models The team invested in a state-of-the-art large language model, reasoning that more capability would translate directly to better outcomes. The infrastructure was built to serve this model. The APIs were optimized for its specifications. Deployment happened. And then the metrics came back: […]
This week, something new–I’ve split out my introductory essay pulling on the threads of this week’s reading from the articles themselves. So you can read either, or both! In other news… Introducing Noops Long time Web Directions speaker and friend Mark Pesce and I have sorted something new, Noops. Part research, part advisory, part punk, […]
The past week’s reading (read my breakdown of nearly 2 dozen articles here)—from across Phoronix to Stripe, from Answer.AI to the fringe blogs that are like canaries in the industry coal mine—points toward a the ongoing reorientation of the entire software development lifecycle. It’s not that AI makes code faster to write. It’s that AI, […]
Your Agents Pass Every Benchmark—Then Memory Breaks Them in Production There's a pattern that's starting to repeat across organizations experimenting with AI agents. The benchmarks look phenomenal. In controlled testing environments, the agent answers questions correctly, completes tasks reliably, and behaves exactly as expected. Your evaluation metrics are solid. Leadership is impressed. Then you deploy […]
How Many Agents Are Too Many? The Hidden Cost of Multi-Agent Systems The multi-agent architecture has become the aspirational design pattern for ambitious AI systems. The logic is appealing: distribute reasoning across specialized agents, orchestrate their collaboration, and watch them tackle problems that single models struggle with. But somewhere between the whiteboard architecture and production […]
This week we have almost certainly the biggest roundup of articles ever in a Weekend Reading–going all the way back to about 2006. We also announced a significant number of speakers for AI Engineer across all tracks. This one is selling fast, so start planning now! And while it’s still a bit further off, at […]
This week I published a long article inspired by the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Kuhn’s groundbreaking work on history, philosophy, and sociology of science from the late 1950s and early 1960s. The resistance to AI-assisted software development among experienced software engineers isn’t random or capricious–it follows the pattern Thomas Kuhn identified in scientific revolutions […]
TL;DR: The resistance to AI-assisted software development among experienced software engineers isn’t random or capricious–it follows the pattern Thomas Kuhn identified in scientific revolutions sixty years ago. What we’re witnessing isn’t a tooling debate. It’s a paradigm shift, complete with anomaly denial, incommensurable worldviews, and paradigm defence mechanisms that have played out very similarly in every intellectual revolution Kuhn observed. Understanding this pattern won’t make the transition painless, but it might make it possible.
A couple of quick notes before this week’s huge crop of articles. We’ve just announced the first round of keynote speakers for the upcoming AI Engineer Conference. I’m incredibly excited and proud of the program we are bringing together.And speaking of programs, CFPs close tomorrow for AI Engineer and AI x Design. We’d love to hear your proposals! And tickets […]
We’re incredibly excited to announce the first round of speakers for AI Engineer Melbourne, coming June 3–4, 2026. It’s a lineup that will bring together engineers, researchers, and leaders who are shaping how we actually build with AI — from the models themselves to the teams and systems around them. In total we’ll have nearly […]
Hardware is ready for its moment Last week, in less than a day, I programmed an M5Stack Core2 to be my personal recording assistant. I’d been using my iPhone to capture voice memos, then manually transferring the audio to my Mac and going through a series of largely manual steps to turn recordings into transcripts and ultimately […]
This week I’ve published a piece that tries to bring together a lot of what I’ve been thinking about in terms of the clearly rapidly increasing capability of not just frontier language models but the software ecosystems around them, and some of the first-order impacts these might have in coming weeks and months. I See Dead […]
Web Directions South is the must-attend event of the year for anyone serious about web development
Phil Whitehouse General Manager, DT Sydney
