The following article originally appeared on Venkatesh Rao’s Substack, Contraptions, and is being republished here with the author’s permission. The sole athletic achievement of my life came in 1993: winning the IIT Bombay freshman 50m freestyle race with a time of 41s. That got me into the college swim team (it was a bad recruitment […]

The early rapid expansion of AI capabilities that focused on frontier models was largely ushered into the world by a few powerful, US-based AI labs. Open-weight models released from labs in China, early on from DeepSeek, and later from Moonshot, Z.ai, and others, have in part disrupted that dominance. But growing concerns about the concentration […]

This is the third post in a four-part series about post-training. If you missed them, read part 1 and part 2. The final post, on implementing your own pipeline, will be coming October 7. Now that you understand the gist of reinforcement learning and supervised fine-tuning, it’s time to explore what post-training has actually accomplished […]

When considering the history of AI, Richard Sutton observed that brute force and compute scale has always trumped human expertise, and when you look for it, you can see this “bitter lesson” play out throughout tech history. In his keynote at Ai4 2026, Tim O’Reilly explains why grappling with the bitter lesson is the forge […]

The following article originally appeared on Addy Osmani’s blog and is being republished here with the author’s permission. A software factory harnesses loops at scale. You can run the loop with humans in it (light factory), trading judgment and concentration against speed and breakage. Or you can ignore the humans (dark factory) and let those […]

The way we talk about data is changing faster than the way we build it. Every quarter a vendor ships a new approach, coins a new term for it, or quietly adopts a term someone else has been using and redefines it to fit the shape of their product. None of this is malicious. Every […]

Every knowledge program seems to begin with the same request. A senior engineer is leaving in six weeks, and someone asks her to document the process she’s carried for years. She returns a clean flowchart of the happy path. The drawing is accurate and may even be elegant. It leaves out the thresholds she watches, […]

My guest on this past week’s Live with Tim O’Reilly was Emmanuel Ameisen, a researcher on Anthropic’s AI interpretability team. I’d heard him give a short talk at Foo Camp on Anthropic’s research into what is going on inside an LLM while it is processing, and I wanted him to reprise the talk and then […]

Is the current furore in mathematics the canary in the coalmine for experimental science and knowledge work? This post was originally published in Vanishing Gradients on September 11, 2026. It has been updated to address the subsequent declaration by 25 Fields Medalists and the debate about AI, mathematical progress, and research incentives. Science without understanding? […]

In 17 years of building enterprise data platforms, I’ve watched every organization eventually ask the same question: “Can I ask one question and get one answer across everything my company knows?” A finance analyst wants actual revenue from the warehouse, pipeline data from the CRM, commentary from planning documents, and market signals from external providers. […]

The most consequential AI news of the past year came from a standards body. In December 2025, Anthropic donated the Model Context Protocol to the newly formed Agentic AI Foundation, a directed fund under the Linux Foundation cofounded by Anthropic, Block, and OpenAI, with support from Google, Microsoft, AWS, Cloudflare, and Bloomberg. Six months earlier, […]

During a service incident, a customer-remediation workflow is moved onto an emergency route because the situation is critical and the team needs a fast resolution. Approvals are shortened, a priority queue is opened, and an on-call agent is cleared to use an alternate procedure until the service recovers. The incident ends, but the route stays […]

There is more technical content available today than any human being could read in a thousand lifetimes. Every topic has a dozen YouTube videos, three Substack posts, a GitHub repo, and a Reddit thread, most created in the last six months and, in many cases, technically accurate. And yet most of the professionals I talk […]

The following article originally appeared on Addy Osmani’s blog and is being republished here with the author’s permission. In the past year, the conversation around agentic engineering has moved to harnesses and loops, fleets and software factories. My 2 cents is engineers need to own the outer loop—the accountability for these systems. This only gets […]

The following article originally appeared on Sean Goedecke’s blog and is being republished here with the author’s permission. In the 2010s, if you had technical gaps (say, you couldn’t write CSS), you had to either rely on a skilled colleague or just hope that the answer to your exact problem was out there on the […]

AI is changing how fast organizations can move. Ideas that used to take months to build now take days, sometimes hours. That sounds like good news, and it is. But it creates a new problem. When execution is fast, teams can move in many directions at once. Marketing can ship a new campaign, product can […]

As a software engineer with more than seven years of experience before the coding-agent era, I never liked the idea of vibe coding. But I knew there was a clear line between it and using coding agents to generate clean, maintainable code. That line, where good software principles meet coding agents, is defined by software […]

Sometime in the next few months, Anthropic is supposed to send me a check. Around $9,000 for me, about the same for my longtime coauthor Jenny Greene, and roughly $18,000 for O’Reilly, our publisher. The reason is that pirated copies of the books Jenny and I wrote, along with a huge amount of other people’s […]

Between March and July 2026, I built a production application of 861,601 lines of code. This included 696 user stories and 779 merged pull requests over 105 days, but I can’t tell you what it cost. The first version of an autonomous SDLC framework driving Claude Code did the work. That generation didn’t record usage, […]

Consider a composite of a failure pattern that’s becoming increasingly common on teams that have scaled AI-assisted development past a handful of enthusiasts. A staff engineer named Priya opens a pull request. The PR is 340 lines and adds an endpoint that writes to the customer table directly, bypassing the internal customer service API. The […]