Most developers use AI for system design in the weakest possible way: They ask one model for one architecture.That is useful, but incomplete.Real system design is not a single answer. It is a negotiation between scalability, cost, reliability, security, delivery speed, operational complexity and team capability. A good architect does not just propose a design. They defend it, attack it, simplify it and document why it prevails.This is where agentic multi-model design becomes powerful.Instead of asking Claude, Codex, GPT or any single model to “design a system,” we can automate a workflow where multiple AI agents debate the architecture and…
Author: drweb
When delivery falls apart, the reflex is to blame the team. Missed dates, quality slips, a burned-out squad — leadership tends to reach for a personnel fix and quietly move on. The uncomfortable pattern in most enterprise organizations is that the system itself is the failure mode. Decision latency, priority misalignment, and layers of governance that were designed for a slower era grind against the very people leaders keep asking to grind harder. Talented engineers cannot outrun a delivery pipeline that is structurally set up to stall.Marnus Marx, founder and Delivery Confidence Coach at Elanvia Consulting, joined Alan Shimel to…
Site reliability engineering has been quietly buckling under its own success. The scope of what SRE teams are expected to own — observability, incident response, telemetry pipelines, capacity, cost, resilience — keeps growing while the tools underneath fragment further. AI is showing up as both the reason the workload keeps expanding and the most credible path to bringing it back under control, but only if agents get built on infrastructure that reliability engineers can actually reason about and trust.Tucker Callaway, CEO of Mezmo, sat down with Alan Shimel at PlatformCon 2026 to walk through how his team is trying to…
Have you ever wanted to create a presentation in your computer’s terminal? While this is an uncommon need, a clever open source developer has provided a solution to this problem! The project is called Spiel, and while it is currently archived, the idea is pretty cool. Spiel uses the Rich package to create the slides for your presentation. Note: while the GitHub page doesn’t explain why the project is archived, it appears to use a very old version of Textual which cannot be upgraded. Let’s spend a little time learning how this all works. Installing Spiel According to the Spiel…
I wrote about learning today for the editorial: I Can’t Make You Learn. I sure hope you want to learn. It’s been great for my career and it will help yours.Join me this September in San Diego (register). I used to live there (Carlsbad) and it’s a beautiful, wonderful part of California to visit. VS Live comes to San Diego, and I’m honored to be speaking this year. Visual Studio Live! (VSLive!) San Diego 2026 is at the Bahia Resort Hotel, September 14–18, 2026 in San Diego, CA. It’s five days of immersive developer training right on Mission Bay. I…
A number on the dashboard gets questioned in a meeting. Nobody can prove who is right, and within ten minutes a room full of expensive people is arguing about a spreadsheet instead of making a decision. I have sat in that room. So have you. The coffee goes cold, the meeting runs long, and everyone leaves agreeing on exactly one thing: the dashboard is wrong. What nobody says is which problem they are looking at, because most teams never learned the difference between data quality, data reliability, and data observability.“The dashboard is wrong” is not a diagnosis. It is a…
SpaceXAI has shipped Grok 4.5, the first model it built jointly with Cursor since acquiring the AI coding platform, and the pitch is squarely aimed at engineering teams watching their token spend. Grok 4.5 is built to excel at coding, agentic tasks, and knowledge work, and it’s the strongest model SpaceXAI has released so far. It’s also, according to Cursor’s own announcement, the first model the company has built beyond software engineering.That broader scope shows up in the training approach. Cursor previously built Composer 2.5 as a coding specialist. For Grok 4.5, the team deliberately broadened the training mix to…
IBM and Red Hat this week revealed that Lightwell Network, a catalog of more than 6,500 application-layer dependencies that drives an automated vulnerability remediation service, is now generally available.At the same time, the Lightwell Clearinghouse Premier service, through which application development teams can both access validated patches and coordinate remediation efforts, is now available to a limited number of organizations.Ben Breard, a senior principal product manager at Red Hat, said collectively these two offerings will make it simpler for organizations to address 30 years of technical debt that is now being exposed by artificial intelligence (AI) models that make it…
The business case for smart contracts is building fast. Major financial institutions are using programmable, code-based agreements to underpin financial workflows, supply chain operations, and tokenization initiatives. Developers are being asked to prove the value.But there’s a problem most organizations don’t fully see until they’re already stuck: privacy.Public blockchains are transparent by design. Every transaction is visible. That’s the feature that makes them trustworthy—and the reason enterprises can’t simply deploy business logic on one without first addressing confidentiality. If your competitors can see your contract terms, you don’t have a business case. You have a liability.“B2B transactions operate with a…
If your Bash prompt still feels like it belongs in 2005, with no syntax highlighting, no fuzzy history search, and just a blinking cursor, Flyline can modernize it in about 30 seconds. I’ve used Readline for as long as I’ve used Bash, which is most of my adult life. It always worked, so I never really thought about replacing it. That changed when a colleague shared his terminal during a screen-sharing session. I noticed his shell highlighted a broken pipe in red before he even pressed Enter, and he could fuzzy-search through his command history as easily as searching messages…