Attention: someone opened the ticket sale overnight. We are as suprised as you are. Hurry to get a fresh ticket from the first batch!

"Compressed Cognition: The Cost of Faster Coding" by Adam Tornhill adamtornhill.substack.com/p/compressed...

"The role of a business analyst is not writing documents. It's understanding the problem domain and coming in with a vast amount of preexisting domain knowledge." @tastapod.com Which is why expecting an AI agent to "one-shot" specs is futile. www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mLY...

I bet that for an AI-intensive project, the first cliff to fall off would be the long-term code quality. I was wrong. It seems that product management debt kicks in faster. Or at least it's not as easily manageable as the code is. pawelbrodzinski.substack.com/p/when-an-ai...

Exclusive: Microsoft is reducing rate limits on GitHub Copilot, removing Opus from $10-a-month subscriptions, and plans to move users to token/API-based billing some time later in 2026 in a sign that it's looking for way to cut costs for its AI services. www.wheresyoured.at/news-microso...

The new ThoughtWorks Tech Radar reads like a warning letter. Cognitive debt. Broken productivity metrics. Terms nobody agrees on. If you've been reading my posts, none of it will surprise you. It's always nice to get evidence that I'm not completely crazy and making all of this up.

People are using « tokens used » as productivity metric ?! « Tokens used »?!?!? That’s like, the first time « lines of code created » gets beaten for the « worst metric of software engineering » 🫠

It's a wrap! #ILSpy 10 is finally here, grab the bits at github.com/icsharpcode/... (as well as VS marketplace + nuget.org + Store (submitted))

Amazon has always been a high-stress sweatshop, and AI is amplifying its worst impulses. Mindlessly forcing engineers to use AI inappropriately while chasing the chimera of "productivity" is not working. You are not more productive if your app is turning to crap as you work on it. 7/8

This talk from Birgitta Boeckeler was my highlight of the Agile meets Architecture conference - really happy to see it made public now. I listened a second time it was so good :-) youtu.be/qB7rsbDfmQg?...

The final preview of #ILSpy 10 is ready for download github.com/icsharpcode/...

"It should not be too surprising that a technology built by scraping everything everyone ever created and claiming it as its own inspires the very same mindset in many of its most ardent proponents."

Microsoft.Data.SqlClient 7.0 Is Here: A Leaner, More Modular Driver for SQL Server #dotnet #sqlserver techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/sqlserv...

In all the foofaraw surrounding AI, many people seem to have forgotten that product development is not all about coding, and that coding is maybe 10% of the actual work. 1/7

As with many of the critiques I see of AI, the problem isn't AI at all. Let's put the blame where it's due, not on the tech, but on incompetent or malevolent management that's forcing the misuse of what could, otherwise, be a useful tool. 6/6

No, AI is not coming for your developer job, regardless of the nonsense the hype mongers are pushing. (I'm talking just about developer jobs—it obviously impacts other areas.) That's not to say the layoffs aren't real, but rather that the corporations are hiding normal corporate behavior behind 1/11

Microsoft.Data.SqlClient 7.0 Preview 4: Finally, Azure.Identity is Optional! 🎉 #dotnet #sqlserver erikej.github.io/sqlclient/do...

As usual siegfriedpammer.bsky.social and me overshot the alloted time, even when cutting down on samples during the talk...

In my experience, the vast majority of waste in a software shop is time spent building things nobody wants on top of overly complex architectures that solve problems we don't have. Focus on that. Put solving your customer's actual (not imagined) problems first. 1/3

Short musings on "cognitive debt" - I'm seeing this in my own work, where excessive unreviewed AI-generated code leads me to lose a firm mental model of what I've built, which then makes it harder to confidently make future decisions simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/...

"If the whole thing collapses, as many people fear, the careless repetition of hype by editors who love the “everything is about to change” narrative (always good for clicks) may well turn out to have been an important contributing factor."

Over on threads someone just use ai;dr and we all need to adopt that right quick

"AI labs are moving up the stack not from strength but from necessity, because the model layer is commoditizing faster than enterprises can be rewired. These players recognize that orchestration, not intelligence, is the real control point."

If your cycle time sucks, automating coding won't do anything to your delivery pipeline. You've got 99 problems, but the pace of coding ain't one. by @paulisthrivving.xyz medium.com/thrivve-part...

Interesting research in HBR today about how the productivity boost you can get from AI tools can lead to burnout or general metal exhaustion, something I've noticed in my own work simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/9/a...

NEW POST Powerful context engineering is becoming a huge part of the developer experience of modern LLM tools. @birgitta410.bsky.social explains the current state of context configuration features, using Claude Code as an example. martinfowler.com/articles/exp...

One of the critical things that distinguishes a senior developer from a junior developer is an understanding, deep in their bones, that the cost of DOING a thing is cheap compared to the cost of truly FINISHING a thing and utterly trivial compared to the cost of MAINTAINING a thing. Like 1:10:10000.

1) Software engineering is not about building features 2) Refactoring is a business problem 3) Software engineering is not an engineering practice 4) LLMs will not replace software engineers 5) Architects don't make decisions by @swardley.bsky.social & @tudorgirba.com medium.com/feenk/rewild...

A statement I totally subscribe to: "Established open source projects have a massive, compounding advantage in the AI era: years of training data." petabridge.com/blog/ai-wont...

Fragments: How AI is changing Anthropic's internal development, a detailed account of using LLM to program a knowledge management tool, obvious-easy-possible buckets for interface design, specifications cannot be complete, and lightweight tools to work with LLMs martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

My longer analysis on what happens to software engineering, as a profession, if and when AI writes most of the code: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/when-ai-wr...

I joined the Oxide and Friends annual predictions podcast episode this week - here are my 1, 3 and 6 year predictions for AI and LLMs (and Kākāpō parrots) simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/8/l...

I'll be doing (as usual) the challenges & changes part

A world without people - AI is a promise to wire the boss’s toy steering wheel directly into the company’s drivetrain. | by Cory Doctorow buff.ly/b7J6SQE #ai #trends #labor

A field guide to sandboxes for AI https://lobste.rs/s/l9gkjo ##devops ##virtualization ##ai

And in case you missed the #ILSpy release itself: github.com/icsharpcode/...

🚀 This week I improved MTP (Microsoft.Testing.Platform) to support WASM, browser, WASI 🌐 and made progress on Android 🤖📱 & iOS 🍎📱. Modern apps deserve modern testing, MTP makes it simple, fast, and future-ready! #dotnet #testing #MTP

Given #minio is on the way out, I kludged together a small sample of #Aspire and #RustFS. AppHost.cs and Program.cs as demoware as can be github.com/christophwil... / github.com/christophwil... #dotnet

The recording of yesterday's talk "Testcontainers - Integration Testing Done Right" is online www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q4T..., samples and slides can be found at github.com/christophwil... #dotnet #Testcontainers

Get yourself a copy of "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" www.goodreads.com/book/show/22... for Christmas

TechEd Europe 2001 - Talking about SOAP in the Bathtub - Don Box - 2001/07 www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULCm...

In two weeks, we are happy to have Christoph Wille as a speaker at our next event! He is talking about Testcontainers and how to use them correctly in integration tests. Thanks to LEAN-CODERS & @uter.bsky.social for hosting us this time! Registration link: dotnetdevs.at/events/2025-... #dotnet

How is AI changing software development? Martin Fowler (@martinfowler.com) says AI is the biggest shift in the field since high-level languages appeared (ones like Fortran or C, offering a new abstraction level to code at, versus Assembly): Full epsiode: www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQmI... (cont'd)

I didn't even mention beans once

My notes on Google's new Antigravity IDE - at first glance it looks like yet another VS Code fork but there are some interesting new ideas in there simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/18/...

☕️ Caffeinated and still in action! After a great coffee break, we’re diving into the next round of sessions with Christoph Wille, Amaury Levé, @codewithanjuli.bsky.social, and Ayesha Kaleem. #UCP25

Back to the action! We’re powering through more cutting-edge dev sessions with our amazing speakers: Chris Woodruff, Leo Visser, Barbara Forbes, and Christoph Wille. Expect sharp insights, actionable techniques, and plenty of aha moments. The ultimate boost for your dev brain. 🚀

You want to base your decision to attend "Extensibility in .NET Applications with #WebAssembly" and/or "#Testcontainers - Integration Testing Done Right" at prague.updateconf.net on more than the session descriptions? Go check out github.com/christophwil... for slides & demos #UCP25 #dotnet

Chris Lattner is one of the most influential engineers of the past two decades. He created LLVM, Swift, contributed to TensorFlow, and created the Mojo language. What was the story about creating Swift - and why did he face resistance inside Apple when wanting to replace Objective C? (cont'd)

The promise of AI chat assistants: they solve 90% of the problems users have (by looking up the docs and telling them) My reality: need to spend 10 minutes trying to get to a human, to solve an issue I need customer support to look into Around minute 8 I sign up to a competitor