Skip to main content

Posts

The Velocity Trap: Why Shipping Faster Is Making Systems Worse

There is a particular flavour of engineering dysfunction that looks, from the outside, like peak performance. Deployments are frequent. Sprint velocity is high. The feature backlog is shrinking. Leadership is pleased. And underneath all of it, the system is quietly rotting. Technical debt compounds with every rushed deployment. Observability gaps widen because nobody has time to instrument the new services properly. The on-call rotation gets noisier every month. But the velocity metrics keep climbing, so nobody sounds the alarm until something breaks badly enough that velocity stops being the conversation. I call this the velocity trap, and it is the most common failure mode in engineering organizations that have adopted DevOps practices without internalizing DevOps principles. The practices say: automate, deploy frequently, iterate fast. The principles say: build quality in, create feedback loops, continuously learn and improve. When you execute the practices without the principles, ...
Recent posts

Anthropic Brings AI-Powered Security Scanning to Enterprise Teams With Claude Security

Anthropic has launched Claude Security in public beta for Claude Enterprise customers. The tool gives security teams a way to scan entire codebases for vulnerabilities — and generate targeted patches — without the usual back-and-forth that slows down remediation. It’s a meaningful step forward for teams struggling to keep pace with the growing volume and complexity of security threats. And it signals where AI-assisted development is heading next. From Research Preview to Public Beta Claude Security isn’t brand new. Anthropic first released it as Claude Code Security in February, initially limited to Enterprise and Team customers. Since then, hundreds of organizations have used it in production, surfacing vulnerabilities that existing tools had missed — in some cases, for years. That real-world feedback shaped what’s shipping today. The public beta is now open to all Claude Enterprise customers globally. Access for Team and Max plan users is coming soon. How it Wo...

Documentation is Dead. Long Live Documentation.

I’m going to say something that will make every engineering manager uncomfortable: Stop asking your team to write documentation . Not because documentation doesn’t matter. It matters more than ever. But because asking humans to document their work after they’ve done it is a process that has failed consistently for thirty years, and no amount of “definition of done” checklists or documentation sprints is going to fix it. The people who know the most write the least. The docs that get written are stale within weeks. And the knowledge that matters most — the decisions, the gotchas, the “why” behind the code — rarely makes it into a document because it’s not the kind of thing you sit down and write. The Documentation Death Spiral I’ve watched this cycle play out on every team I’ve been part of: Week 1: “We need to document this.” Everyone agrees. Someone creates a Confluence space. Week 4: A few pages exist. They’re pretty good. Written by the one person who cares about docs. Week...

LocalStack Adds Ability to Visually Debug AWS Apps on Local Machines

LocalStack today announced it has extended its ability to simulate Amazon Web Services (AWS) environments to provide an ability to debug applications before deploying them. Company CEO Colin Neagle said App Inspector makes it possible for developers to debug their applications running in a simulated AWS environment inside a container on a local server. Simulating the full application stack within a local sandbox container makes it possible to better understand application behavior such as data flows between AWS services, event execution paths and resource dependencies that may have been inadvertently misconfigured, noted Neagle. Once discovered, App Inspector then generates a visual representation of the interaction between services in the local environment to make it simpler to debug applications without digging through logs and then needing to upload a fix to a staging server running in the AWS cloud. That capability doesn’t replace the need for an observability platform but i...

Google CEO Says 75% of New Code is AI-Generated

The era of the “human-only” software engineer is rapidly receding into the rearview mirror. Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed Wednesday that a whopping 75% of the company’s new code is now generated by artificial intelligence (AI), marking a major shift in how the tech giant builds its products. The velocity of this transition has caught even industry observers off guard. Just 18 months ago, in early 2024, AI-generated code accounted for only a quarter of Google’s output. By late 2025, that figure had climbed to 50%. Today’s 75% milestone signals that AI has moved from a supplemental “autocomplete” tool to the primary engine of production at Google. Pichai noted that the workflow has evolved into something “truly agentic.” Instead of human engineers laboriously writing lines of code or using AI to finish a single sentence, they are now supervising autonomous digital teams. These AI agents can plan, execute, and refactor entire codebases with minimal human intervention. The effic...

The Vibing Continuum: How Software Will Vibe its Way Through Agentic Engineering 

Did God vibe the universe into existence? My mind served up a strange thought at three in the morning. The sudden idea may have been sparked from an occurrence in the previous evening, when one of our team members spun an entire e-commerce website by merely “vibing ”  with Codex. I tried to shush my mind, but it wouldn’t stay quiet.    God spoke, let there be light and there was light, isn’t that a classic example of spinning the whole universe by sheer vibing? Now for the record, my mind has never contested or undermined the Big Bang theory, but creating the world through mere words feels far less unbelievable when seen through the  vibe coding analogy . The mind prodded further.    Could God have created and then deputed (abandoned?) the world to human agents, eerily similar to how humans have deputed (are deputing) software development to AI agents?    Possible, entirely possible! Now my eyes were wi...

When AI Goes Really, Really Wrong: How PocketOS Lost All Its Data

You can’t make this crap up. You just wish you could. Jer Crane, founder of the small vertical software company, PocketOS , reported on X that the AI Cursor coding agent and a Railway backup misconfiguration combined to briefly wipe out the company’s car‑rental customer production data . Not some of the data. All of it. That’s a company killer. Fortunately for PocketOS and its customers, Crane later reported that Railway had managed to “recover the data (thank God!).” Thanks to that miracle save of reconstructing the missing data from earlier backups, PocketOS and its customers are back in business. But how could this happen in the first place? According to Crane, it was a chain of failures from both Cursor , the AI development environment, and Railway , his infrastructure provider. Together, they created a “perfect storm” that turned a routine staging bug fix into a company‑threatening outage. In his post, Crane recounted how an autonomous AI coding agent running inside Cursor, ...