Monday, August 17, 2026

Archives for August 2026

The Orchestrator’s Tax

I was deep into a Claude Code session on a .NET codebase when a doubt interrupted the work. Four subagents were already running against a response-pipeline refactor, results were arriving out of order, and the session had started to feel harder to reason about than the code itself. That is usually the moment I stop […]

The Economic Benefit of Refactoring

As part of getting to grips with the new world of agentic engineering, I built an application to support my work. It’s a sophisticated app: high-quality web UI with dynamic refresh and look-up, modals and auto-save, integrations to external systems, machine learning and text analysis, background jobs, and a proper environment setup with fully automated […]

Core Ultra Series 3 Roars To Life At CES

As promised, Intel has launched the Core Ultra Series 3 processors at CES 2026. These are the long-awaited “Panther Lake” chips, and if Intel’s claims hold up under our own testing, they look incredibly impressive. Intel made some very big promises at the show: 24% improved multi-threaded performance versus its own Arrow Lake […]

The Conductor Developer

TL;DRWhy I think software development is starting to feel a little more like conducting an orchestra. There’s a shift happening in software development that I don’t think we’re talking about clearly enough. For the last couple of years we’ve framed AI as a productivity tool. How much faster can it write code? How many more […]

An Impressive New Take On Foldables

At CES 2026 in Las Vegas this past week, I finally had the opportunity to go hands on with the Galaxy Z TriFold, Samsung’s first phone that folds twice and transforms from a regular 6.5-inch Android handset into a 10-inch Android tablet. On the surface, the Z TriFold is essentially […]

Fragments: August 4

There’s been a fair bit of publicity of the Open AI “rogue agent” that hacked into Hugging Face. This prompted Anthropic to check what their models were up to and, to my complete lack of surprise, discovered three incidents where models had gained unauthorized access to data in other organizations. Simon Wilison concluded: It’s abundantly […]

RTX Spark Unveiled At Computex 2026

Computex 2026 and GTC Taipei will go down in history as the moment NVIDIA used to officially announce its entrance into the PC market. During his keynote at the Taipei Music Center, CEO Jensen Huang announced the RTX Spark – formerly codenamed N1 and N1X – which will power an array of premium […]

TDD inside the agent loop

The TDD (test-driven development) workflow can be used with AI-augmented coding in multiple ways: Human writes the tests: A human defines the test scenarios in some form, be it in natural language, in BDD style, or directly in code. Then AI writes the implementation to make those tests pass (with maybe a first step that […]