Given the state and trajectory of agents today: if someone wanted to start learning how to be a software engineer today, what book would you recommend to them?

Wired's kicker on their story about the UFO releases is the thing to keep in mind. This is a good reason why they wouldn't hide things; and a better reason why they'd stir shit up: www.wired.com/story/pentag...

Can I make a polymarket bet that he eventually polygraphs the polygraph guy?

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10 lessons for agentic coding. www.dbreunig.com/2026/05/04/1...

Coming back to drafting a set of "10 commandments" for coding with agents. Here are the current candidates: - Implement to learn - Rebuild often - E2E tests are gold - Document intent - Maintain your spec - Find what's hard (that's the value) Thoughts? What am I missing?

The fact that residential restrictions are being presented as way to address the crisis is insane. www.wired.com/story/the-su...

Frustration at GitHub and Claude outages and inconsistencies is a good argument against the idea that we’ll be able to vibe code everything we need.

Claude is down, time to check in on the state of local models.

Are they getting royalties? www.theverge.com/tech/916681/...

Release day for DSPy. Big one with lots of RLM improvements, optimization chaining, type checking, LiteLLM decoupling, and 24 first time contributors. github.com/stanfordnlp/...

Tim Cook ends his tenure with the most Tim Cook product possible: a low-price, high margin laptop that repurposes 2nd tier binned silicon from iPhone runs. I mean this in the best way. The Neo is a great, accessible product. That leverages the rest of the supply chain.

With a few exceptions, successful agents become workflows.

Perfect take.

Anthropic has clearly post-trained Opus 4.7 to say “Good push,” instead of, “You’re absolutely right.” (Still a 3 tokens gain with the new tokenizer, for those counting.)

My not-so-monthly newsletter just went out, covering the gaps between the potential of current models, and their real-world impact. Check it out: buttondown.com/dbreunig/arc...

Allbirds getting into AI is essentially a SPAC. Ignore it.

If the Mythos claims hold, to harden a system you need to spend more tokens discovering exploits than attackers will spend exploiting them. www.dbreunig.com/2026/04/14/c...

A few weeks ago, it was common to hear people argue one should use agents to replace dependencies for security reasons. In light of the Mythos news, the math changes. Using an OSS lib that’s had tens of thousands of $ of agentic hardening is likely optimal.

In my head, I've started referring to these as "rosary games." You play them like one might say the rosary as you work your way down the beads. They're games you play to engage you attention just a bit, allowing you to mediate, wind down, or focus. They're not challenging. They're not urgent.

I keep hearing from non-tech people they loved this movie because it took the time to explain plainly how LLMs work. It’s been 3+ years since ChatGPT and this is probably the first good, mass market attempt. Absolute dereliction of responsibilities by leading labs

The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House: an attempt to put our era of sprawling, idiosyncratic tooling in context. www.dbreunig.com/2026/03/26/w...

Bryce 1.0 (1994)

At the DSPy meetup a couple weeks ago, Kshetrajna Raghavan walked through how DSPy helps with efficiency, modularity, and performance at Shopify scale: www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxTo...

I don't think I've ever felt more like the meme of the sweaty dude agonizing over what button to press.

I used Google Stitch, the AI frontend design tool whose announcement had people panic selling Figma. I am beginning to think people should try these tools before they react...

2016: Companies argue they’re a software company to get higher valuations. 2026: Companies argue they’re not a software company to get higher valuations. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

If you’re buying the first campaigns on a platform, you shouldn’t be expecting data saying the ads “worked”. The point is being first, learning, getting the awards, and being seen as a leader.

Based on my friends in the military, it makes total sense that the two most regular leakers of military info are Warthunder forums and Strava. www.lemonde.fr/en/internati...

“This is, I’m sorry to say, altogether goofy, but nonetheless beautifully expresses a desperate romanticism that seems endemic to the United States: a desire for roots in some place other than this, our graceless national project.”

Two years ago I build a dataset from Wikidata for exactly this and am so happy someone else built it!

“Don’t go in the kitchen. The robot’s making dinner on a Ralph loop.”

Apple's AI leverage is their developer tools. If the next iOS adds a feature where an AI can inspect and parse the programmatic layout of an app (either when onscreen or off), without doing screen-grabs and image processing, no one will complain that they're licensing Gemini.

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This is THE issue. And honestly, picking another provider doesn't solve it. I fully expect the military to eventually train their own model. www.dbreunig.com/2026/03/01/t...

*monkey paw curls* a niche obsession with training run variance is sure gonna become important soon ...

A DSPy tutorial: learn the fundamentals while building a deep research agent. Covers Signatures & Modules: what they are and why they matter. No DSPy experience required. www.cmpnd.ai/blog/learn-d...

The inaugural ACM CAIS 2026 conference on AI systems is soliciting additional reviewers. If you are interested in reviewing, please fill out this short form. Reviewers should expect a load of 4-5 papers, with reviews due April 3, 2026. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

llms.txt is a failed standard. Supply-side standards (like Do Not Track) don't work; creating demand is the only lever connected to anything. dri.es/markdown-llm...

Yesterday I gave a talk sharing what I learned building a no-code library, why spec-driven development is a feedback loop not a straight line, historical parallels for our current moment, and shared a PoC tool for keeping specs/tests/code in sync. www.dbreunig.com/2026/03/04/t...

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The Anthropic/DoW conversation centered around terms of use, but the real issue is embedded judgment. www.dbreunig.com/2026/03/01/t...

Who is this for?

Two beliefs about the agentic coding narrative: 1. Most devs underestimate what they bring to the agent. Agents amplify skills. 2. Most coding agent written software we see are personal tools, not capital-P products. Shipping remains hard. www.dbreunig.com/2026/02/25/t...

Time for another SF DSPy meetup. This time focusing on DSPy in production use cases and RLMs. Engineers from Dropbox and Shopify will be sharing case studies and answering questions, and Isaac Miller will be walk through dspy.RLM. Come! luma.com/je6ewmkx

Please, someone: build an API designed for agents and claws that answers geo questions, using Overture and OSM data. Google Maps pricing tiers are not made for this and designing an API that translates LLM logic into geo queries is not insignificant. Also, OSM is getting unsustainably hammered.