Latest / October 13, 2026
11 posts from engineering leaders published October 13, 2026, by Simon Willison, Stephane Moreau, Martin Fowler and 4 more.
Redesigning source control at Anthropic Interesting piece from Anthropic describing why and how they built their own custom alternative to Git, based on the dramatic increase in rate of changes to their code after the past six months. In May 2026, Anthropic averaged around 2,500…
Release: llm-gemini 0.35 I added support to llm-gemini for the new Gemini 4 Argon model, made available today via the Gemini API and for customers of their $100/month subscription plan. Here are the low, medium and high pelicans . As expected, they are all excellent: Gemini has…
The old software engineering dream is officially dead.
A couple of months ago Jim Highsmith explained how practitioners writing for each other forms a distinct style of writing. He now adds a section to the article with more detail on the craft of how we write in this style. How the writer shows up in the prose, its four principles,…
Naresh Jain compares coding agents building the same API service with and without a behavioral harness. A frontier model, GPT-6 Sol, passed every external evaluation either way. But a cost-optimized model, GPT-6 Luna, succeeded in only 3 of 10 unharnessed runs and all 10 with…
If the agent isn't using my diagnostics library, I could introspect and update AGENTS.md, but there's still a delta, and it'll drift. Instead, I write a pre-commit hook that checks the git diff for direct calls to observability modules that bypass my diagnostics module. Boom:…
I keep hearing complaints about code review. About volume, about quality, about trying to take responsibility for code produced by colleagues who have abdicated their responsibility for thinking and are uncritically hitting enter. But how much of that is just grumpiness?…
I remember the name of that AI doco now - The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist . I was watching it on the long-haul flight home the other day, and what I found particularly engrossing was the polar-opposite opinions from a bunch of people: "it'
Josh Wulf and I talked loop engineering for four episodes. The models stopped being the constraint a long time ago; what's left is vision, verification and agency. Delete your skill packs, put the whole system under test, and revisit everything that used to be hard.
Back in August I mentioned the new curl performance tests we have running. I figured it could be apt to return to this topic just to mention some of the initial outcomes. When the team gets a new set of charts, graphs and plots that visualize something, like performance, they…
Release: web-edit 0.1a1 Includes performance optimizations written by Claude Opus 5.5 after I fed it this Python 3.15 profiling report generated by GPT-6 Astra. Tags: profiling , projects