What's happening in AI-controlled business

Also: AI-agent generated pull requests cause headaches for large open source projects, OpenAI acquires the creator of uv, a sudden Cursor price hike annoys some enterprise customers, and more

Jean Lee, engineer #19 at WhatsApp, on scaling the app with a tiny team, the Facebook acquisition, and what it reveals about the future of engineering.

As more software engineers use AI agents daily, there’s also more sloppy software, outages, quality issues, and even a slowdown in shipping velocity. What’s happening, and how do we solve it?

Also: new trend of token costs becoming a worry for CTOs, 10% cuts at Atlassian, and more.

Where we are right now, and what likely happens next

Steve Yegge on how AI is reshaping software engineering, the rise of “vibe coding,” and why developers must adapt to a rapidly changing craft.

How Uber built Minion, Shepherd, uReview, and other internal agentic AI tools. Also, new challenges in rolling out AI tools, like more platform investment and growing concern about token costs

Also: 40% job cuts at Block “not due to AI”, Antigravity bans reinforce Google’s disdain for paying customers, and more

Claude Code creator Boris Cherny on building AI-powered coding tools, parallel agents, and how the engineer's role is evolving in an AI-first world.

Claude Code dominates tool usage, leaders are more positive about AI than engineers, staff+ engineers are the biggest users of AI agents, and more. Exclusive data and analysis from 900+ respondents

An engineer at Cloudflare rewrote most of Vercel’s Next.js in one week with AI agents. It looks like a sign of how AI will disrupt existing moats and business models. Analysis

Quantifying the capability-reliability gap

OpenAI has some big questions. It doesn’t have unique tech. It has a big user base, but with limited engagement and stickiness and no network effect. The incumbents have matched the tech and are leveraging their product and distribution. And a lot of the value and leverage will come from new experi…

It's not just chatbots anymore

Applying the AI as Normal Technology framework to legal services

This famous aphorism is neither true nor useful

Thriving in a world of agents

With the right tools, AI can accomplish impressive things

And why Nano Banana Pro is such a big deal

How far do LLMs give us a step change in how good a search and recommendation system can be? Do they let you build one without needing a vast user base of your own?

From chatbots to agents

As AI advice becomes more important, we are going to need to get better at assessing it

What AI to use in late 2025

The race between human-centered work and infinite PowerPoints

Verifying magic on the jagged frontier

And a big change for this newsletter

Confronting the production-progress paradox

With every platform shift, we want to measure the growth but we’re confused about what to measure. That’s partly a problem of data and definitions, but it’s really a question about what this is going to be.

Generative AI chatbots might be a life-changing transformation in the nature of computing, that can replace all software, but so far, most of its users only pick it up every week or two, and far fewer have made it part of their lives. Is that a time problem or a product problem?

There is no capability threshold that will lead to sudden impacts

A new paper that we will expand into our next book

Software ate the world. Uber and Airbnb didn’t sell software - they disrupted and redefined markets. But what kind of disruption are we talking about ?

It matters that Apple’s new Siri will be late, and it matters more that Apple didn’t realise. Is it more than that?

OpenAI’s Deep Research is built for me, and I can’t use it. It’s another amazing demo, until it breaks. But it breaks in really interesting ways.

Every week there’s a better AI model that gives better answers. But a lot of questions don’t have better answers, only ‘right’ answers, and these models can’t do that. So what does ‘better’ mean, how do we manage these things, and should we change what we expect from computers?

Making sense of recent technology trends and claims

Technology Isn’t the Problem—or the Solution.

Seemingly minor technical decisions can have life-or-death effects

A quarter century after ‘don't be evil’ a judge has found that Google is abusing its monopoly in search. But no-one knows what happens next, and whether this ruling will change anything. Will Apple build a search engine? Will ChatGPT change search? Does it matter?

Hundreds of millions of people have tried ChatGPT, but most of them haven’t been back. Every big company has done a pilot, but far fewer are in deployment. Some of this is just a matter of time. But LLMs might also be a trap: they look like products and they look magic, but they aren’t. Maybe we ha…