Big, distributed computing systems seldom have visible failures. Most of them start without any bang, frequently with a health-check disconnection, a failed TCP connection or a service port that is no longer listening. Such signals are not too big when considered in isolation. However, in the scenario where systems are running with several hundreds of service instances spread across different regions, these small anomalies can be summed into a continuous flow of operational alerts. This alert traffic may eventually turn into a bullying powerhouse of notable operational noise within infrastructure platforms.In most production setups, port-down alerts constitute a significant percentage…
Author: drweb
Traditional CI/CD pipelines were designed around deterministic software: The same input, configuration and dependency set should produce the same output. This assumption works for APIs, batch jobs and most containerized services. It does not hold cleanly for autonomous AI agents.An agent is a runtime composition of orchestration logic, prompt templates, tool schemas, retrieval context, model configuration, memory and external tool calls. A one-line prompt edit can change the reasoning path. A JSON schema update can make the agent choose a different tool. A retry-policy change can create an accidental loop. A model upgrade can shift behavior even when the application…
Three years ago, two days before a production push to Azure, I was working through a pull request on a Node.js service. Routine stuff. Then I spotted something in a commit that had been merged two weeks earlier. Already past review, already on the main branch. A Stripe secret key. Not obfuscated, not in a config file. Plain text, right there in the source. Build was green. Tests passed. Nobody had caught it.That incident changed how I think about CI/CD. The problem wasn’t that my team was careless. The problem was that our pipeline had no opinion about security. It…
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…
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…