Kode Vicious: Pebbles on the Beach Keeping hold of the big questions There are fewer things more maddening than watching someone wander around a space bumping into ideas as if they’re in a pinball machine. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

EngThrive: Make It Fast and Easy to Do Great Work A durable model deployed at Microsoft that measures outcome-oriented engineering organizing productivity into three dimensions: speed, ease, and quality, with "thriving" as a well-being guardrail queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

You Don’t Know Jack About Formal Verification: What can you confidently guarantee about your software? By eliminating the cost of writing proofs, AI is removing the biggest barrier to formal verification. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

In Code They Think; In Proof We Trust AI agents can be hijacked by prompt injection to exfiltrate sensitive data. Solution: Constrain the agent to express its plan as a Kotlin script, then statically verify the script against a security policy before execution queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

The SPACE of AI: Real-world lessons of AI’s impact on developers AI is augmenting developers rather than replacing them. Effective integration depends as much on team culture and support structures as on the tools themselves. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

From Technical Debt to Cognitive and Intent Debt: Rethinking software health in the age of AI Cognitive debt is the erosion of shared understanding, when no one can explain how a system works. Intent debt is the absence of clear goals, constraints, and rationale. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI Examining the most common misconceptions This article provides practitioners, team leads, and engineering leaders research so the decisions organizations make about AI are grounded in evidence, not just enthusiasm. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Climbing the Generative AI Mountain A “hitchhiker’s guide” for product managers Generative AI has arrived in the workplace, with high expectations and little guidance. PMs are expected to be more productive overnight, without a map for how to get there. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

The AI-Native Developer Redefining work, identity, and the future of craft In the context of pervasive AI, what parts of your job are still worth doing? Through surveys and interviews with practitioners, we investigate what it means to be a software developer today queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Knowledge Graphs over Two Decades: From web-scale extraction to LLM-augmented intelligence Xia Luna Dong The boundary between symbolic and neural knowledge continues to blur, leading to a new era of flexible, context-aware knowledge systems. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Operations & Life The Important Decisions Document Every project (& family) needs one Long-running projects are a journey. An IDD helps new team members get up to speed, prevents wasting time on relitigating old decisions, improves morale, and increases accountability queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Kode Vicious: KV the Apostate Faith-based computing versus the unnatural science Whether we ask an LLM or a recent graduate to type the code is less important than knowing what the code does, how it was built, and when to look under the hood queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Bridging the Moat: Security for the Layperson Usability is core to effective security controls Cybersecurity is not just a problem facing enterprises. Individual users face similar risks without expertise and support to back them up. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

The Second-System Pit of Failure Lessons learned from building a second-generation system Our experience with building a new LMS to replace an existing system provides at least one point of evidence that it is possible to avoid the SSE trap. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Building Malleable Systems, not Future-Proof Ones: Design for Change The code you write can’t possibly predict every change that comes along. Code is like a house, and people have to live in it, often for much longer than you expect. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Kode Vicious Escape Routes Design your APIs carefully #Software is almost infinitely fungible, but at some point you have to make choices and pin down what you want a thing to do. This is the art of #API design. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Open Source and the Iceberg Theory: Why “dependency management” isn’t enough anymore In an era of AI-generated code and increasing supply-chain attacks, stewardship is now a fiduciary and societal imperative. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i... @auggie.dev

Paul Vixie on the Evolution of Program State AI coding assistants mean more software will be created than ever before and by more people and agents than ever before. It's undecided as yet whether this era will be safer or more dangerous than the last. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Data Analysis: Why Is It So Complicated? A sense of the depth and breadth of why it's so complicated to conduct and interpret data analysis. Why your models are incomplete and rife with inaccuracies, assumptions, caveats, and limitations queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Minimalist Design for Space Camera Flight Software While many systems drift toward more complexity, we advocate for a minimalist approach, with examples that have performed well in practice, with applications for other embedded software. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Running the “Reflections on Trusting Trust” Compiler Revisiting Ken Thompson’s sourceless backdoor This article revisits that backdoored compiler, presenting the original code Thompson wrote more than 50 years ago. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Kode Vicious: Driven to Distraction From floats to characters and back again 50 years of doing things the Unix way has left us bereft of better APIs. It's not just the drivers but also the application APIs on top of the operating system. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Operations and Life: #SRE Is Anti-Transactional An API for interfacing with automaters Systems built by SREs are not fully autonomous on day one. It's iteration over time that leads to fully autonomous, functional, reliable service. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i... @yesthattom.bsky.social

A Practical Guide to Transitioning to Memory-Safe Languages Turning off the spigot of vulnerabilities: a new strategy for memory safety Traditional approaches to memory safety are flawed, treating symptoms without addressing the underlying cause. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i... @ayper.bsky.social

Practical #Security in Production Hardening the C++ Standard Library at massive scale Our collective experience at Apple and Google demonstrates that significant safety gains are achievable with surprisingly minimal performance overhead in production environments queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Safe Coding Rigorous modular reasoning about software safety Safe coding embodies a modular, compositional approach to building and reasoning about the safety of large, complex systems. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Memory Safety for Skeptics If you're tired of hearing about memory safety, this article is for you. The state of possibility with memory safety today is similar to the state of automobile safety just prior to the widespread adoption of mandatory seat-belt laws. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Kode Vicious The Process: From start to finish While the Scientific Method gives us a way to evaluate a hypothesis, a Scientific Process allows us to organize our minds to form these hypotheses, lay out a piece of code, organize a project, or debug a program. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Operations and Life No One Has Time to Work on Your Project queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i... What if you could apply a few basic principles that would help make working on your project seem more attractive and worthwhile? How to work effectively with overwhelmed people to get things done

Moving Faster by Not Breaking Things: Or How Not to Blow Up the Internet People slow down when they are afraid, and they are afraid when they don't know the consequences of their actions. Initial investments allow for a fearless approach to pushing changes. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Guardians of the Agents Formal verification of AI workflows This proof-based approach addresses problems by providing deterministic and verifiable assurances of safety without the need to trust the AI nor any of the artifacts it produces queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Unsolved Problems in #MLOps The practitioners whose job it is to make AI work are scrambling behind the scenes, often more in dread than excitement. Either find a better paradigm or fix the ones we're using now. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Understanding the Harm Teens Experience on Social Media: A systematic approach to mitigating negative experiences online Every day, millions of kids are having preventable harmful experiences on social media queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Kode Vicious In Search of Quietude Unless you're writing only for yourself, whatever software you build will need to work with what others are building. So, the meta question is: "How much communication is required?" queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Security Is Part of Every Critical User Journey How else would you make sure that product security decisions serve your customers? Raise your hand and propose that security outcomes and risks be defined at each step along critical user journeys. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Unleashing the Power of End-User Programmable AI The design of an AI-first, program-synthesis framework built around a new language, Universalis, designed for workers to read, the computer to execute, and ready to be analyzed and manipulated queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Concurrency in #WebAssembly Experiments in the web and beyond We discuss how concurrent programs are compiled to #Wasm today given the limitations of multi-core concurrency support, and also discuss further expanding Wasm's concurrency capabilities queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

When Is WebAssembly Going to Get DOM Support? Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love glue code Can I build my C#/Go/Python library/app into my website so it runs with good performance? queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

WebAssembly: How Low Can a Bytecode Go?: New performance and capabilities Wasm is still growing with new features to address performance gaps. With many languages and many targets, Wasm could one day become the universal execution format for compiled applications. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

#WebAssembly: Yes, but for What? WebAssembly has found a niche but not yet filled its habitable space. We look at #Wasm wins and losses, identify patterns, and extract commonalities. From those, we predict the future. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i... @wingolog.org

Research for Practice: The Point is Addressing Even something as innocent as addressing comes from a rich design space filled with tradeoffs between important considerations such as scaling, transparency, overhead, and programmer control. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

AI: It's All About Inference Now Model inference has become the critical driver for model performance. Test-time compute scaling offers a new, exciting avenue to increase model performance beyond what can be achieved with training queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Develop, Deploy, Operate A holistic model for understanding the costs and value of software development: - Tensions between factors - 4 distinct forms of impact - Warning against measuring against unknown counterfactuals - Consensus mechanism for estimating DDR costs. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Generative AI at the Edge: Challenges and Opportunities We will soon see embodied, federated, and cooperative models become commonplace, enhancing our lives in the background. However, these models won't just compute; they will communicate, create, and adapt. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

The Soft Side of Software: Peer Mentoring Stop waiting for a senior mentor to appear. Your peers are some of the most valuable mentors you'll ever find. Leverage those relationships, share insights, and bring value to every conversation. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Kode Vicious: Can't We Have Nice Things? Careful crafting and the longevity of code We build apparatus to show some effect. This is how empiricists operate. They have a hunch, build an apparatus, run an experiment, refine the hunch, and then wash, rinse, and repeat. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Drill Bits Sandboxing: Foolproof Boundaries vs. Unbounded Foolishness Sandboxing mitigates risks of software so large, it's likely to harbor security vulnerabilities To safely harness useful yet opaque libraries, a simple mechanism provides confinement—or does it? queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Operations and Life A Clean Approach to Process Optimization My soap-loading technique isn't revolutionary, but it demonstrates process design: You can eliminate delays in starting a process by front-loading tasks whenever possible. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i... @yesthattom.bsky.social

Kode Vicious Analyzing Krazy Kode Code communicates our intentions to other humans. Code, like prose, has style and color and subtlety. When you open a function and start reading, try to think, "How do I feel about reading this." queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

From Function Frustrations to Framework Flexibility Fixing tool calls with indirection The principle of indirection can be applied to introduce a paradigm shift: replacing direct value manipulation with symbolic reasoning using named variables. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...