Shipping Sandboxed Workers for Notion Agents The moment you let developers extend a system with custom code, you've opened a door you can never fully close. It's powerful — users can do anything — and terrifying for the team that has to maintain the platform. Add AI agents to the equation and the problem gets […]
Craft in the Time of Agents You're shipping more than ever. Features that would have taken your team weeks to build now take days. You're moving faster, scaling further, doing more with less. And by Wednesday you're exhausted. This is the paradox of AI coding assistants that almost no one talks about. You feel more […]
What If You Never Needed an API Key Again? Building a Mesh LLM From Spare Compute Every AI application today is built on a dependency. You make an API call to OpenAI, Claude, Gemini—one of a handful of providers running models in massive data centres. Your code can't run without that call succeeding. Your costs […]
Everything Is a Factory The age of hand-crafted software is ending. Not because humans are becoming obsolete, but because the economics have shifted so radically that we're building the wrong thing when we build by hand. For decades, software development meant hiring people to write code. You'd bring in engineers, they'd spend months building features, […]
COBOL and AI: Building a Self-Serve Knowledge Layer for 2,000 Batch Jobs The biggest obstacle to modernization isn't the technology. It's the knowledge locked inside legacy systems. When you've got 2,000 COBOL batch jobs running your core operations, modernization planning hits a wall immediately. Someone needs to understand what each job does, what files it […]
The Software Engineer Who Don't Code The job title hasn't changed, but the job itself is in the middle of a profound shift. Software engineers have always been problem-solvers, but the mix of skills and time allocation is rebalancing in ways that few predicted. The moment AI coding tools became good enough that they could […]
Recently we sat down to book flights for speakers coming in for the conference. Two or three dozen of them. The task itself is genuinely simple: pick the dates, find the right flights, enter the passenger details, pay. Easy when it’s one. Painful when it’s many. Each booking is multiple steps, each step several clicks […]
The full schedule for AI Engineer Melbourne is now live.The grid view is the most useful way to scan it. There’s also semantic search, and a recommendation system as well to find related talks to ones you’re interested in. We’ve also shipped an agent-friendly view with MCP endpoints, llms.txt, and other interfaces designed for agents — the conference about […]
How a recurring rhetorical move keeps proving the wrong thing There is now a recognisable pattern in AI commentary. It runs roughly as follows. A paper appears on arXiv. It contains real mathematics — definitions, lemmas, a theorem, sometimes several. The theorem establishes that a particular formal object, under a particular set of assumptions, has […]
DGX Spark & Sovereign AI: Architecting Air-Gapped Agents There's a historical pattern worth noting: computing power that was once centralized tends, over time, to get distributed. Mainframes belonged to institutions. Personal computers put computing in homes and offices. Mobile devices put it in pockets. Each shift democratized something — access, speed, the ability to build […]
Agentic Self-Healing in Production It's 2:47 AM on a Tuesday. Your data pipeline fails. A sensor stops reporting, a database connection is dropped, an API that your system depends on starts returning errors. In the old world, this is when an engineer gets paged. They wake up, SSH into the server, run some diagnostics, fix […]
Who Needs a LoRA? There's an assumption embedded in how people work with image generation models: if you want the model to do something new or specific, you fine-tune it. You get the pretrained model, you gather a dataset of examples of what you want it to do, you run a training process, and you […]
Having Your Cake and Eating It: An Implementation Guide for Privacy with AI There's a fundamental tension at the heart of modern AI deployment: the models that work best require the most data, and the data that makes models work comes with the steepest privacy costs. The larger the model, the more examples it needs […]
A few months ago I sat down to work through some thoughts about the different ways developers are working with AI. The list seemed straightforward enough at the time. There was the spicy autocomplete you got in your IDE. There was the turn-by-turn chat with Claude or ChatGPT. There was the Git-integrated agent — Codex, […]
Beat Burnout, Find Flourishing: The AI Edition The pace feels relentless. A new AI tool arrives on your team's desk every few weeks. Code completion assistants, autonomous agents, generative models for everything from design to documentation. There's genuine excitement about what's possible, but underneath it runs a current of exhaustion. People are burning out not […]
Web Directions South is the must-attend event of the year for anyone serious about web development
Phil Whitehouse General Manager, DT Sydney
