There are (sort of) two kinds of coders: those who see it as just a well-paying, stable job, and those who do it on nights and weekends because they love it, and it’s part of their identity. *Both* are under attack from bosses trying to put them out of work... www.anildash.com/2026/03/13/c... ...

The future of software development belongs to those who can best articulate what they want to build and how it should work. The ability to just write good code is no longer enough. Developers will have to write good words as well. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/m...

Early day is for this new offering from the creator of Kotlin. But the guiding principle is one that I think is going to fundamentally change the way we create software into the future. Write specs, not code. Need to change the code, change the spec first. 🏆 👏 codespeak.dev

CodeSpeak is a new "language" from the Kotlin creator, where you write a spec describing the program, and it generates the program. https://codespeak.dev/ I can see this working for utilities/pure functions, but I have a hard time imagining it for full-stack app.

WHAT IF YOU JUST READ A FUCKING BOOK

Important bit from this recent blog post that highlights both why up front spec development is so important in agentic engineering, and also why its so hard to do well. www.claudecodecamp.com/p/i-m-buildi...

Agentic coding is changing the way software is developed, but it likely won't remove humans from the process. Human expertise is as critical as ever. adhoc.team/2026/03/09/h... #AI #ChatGPT #Claude #Gemini #Cursor

New on the SpecOps Blog - Modernizing Government Regulations with AI. spec-ops.ai/blog/posts/m...

Trim down those bloated AGENTS.md files. mheadd.github.io/agent-slimmer/ #ai #cursor #copilot #agents #claude

If this doesn't get your body moving in some kind of way, get your pulse checked. 🏵️ ❤️ 🎤 🎧

🚀 NEW on We ❤️ Open Source 🚀 AI is making code cheaper to write & easier to understand, shifting the real scarcity to domain knowledge. Mark Headd explores why future collaboration may center on sharing specifications and institutional expertise. allthingsopen.org/articles/ai-... #WeLoveOpenSource

This is important. "CLAUDE.md is not a one-time setup. It’s a living document — but not an ever-growing one."

New research has lots of people saying AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md files aren't worth it. But the research shows that AI coding agents follow these instructions reliably — the problem is most of these files are full of things agents would figure out anyway. 1/2

New research: AI agents given human-curated Skills improved performance 16 points on average. AI Agents that generated their own skills files? Essentially zero benefit. Human expertise still matters most. spec-ops.ai/blog/posts/s... #AI #Claude #ChatGPT #LLMs #Codex #Copilot

Me, coming back to work after vacation: "I'm coming back to this project after being away for about a week and there have been several non-trivial changes committed to the code. Can we do a fresh git pull and discuss the changes that have been made?"

Anthropic's new report on #AI coding trends shows that engineers use AI in 60% of their work but fully delegate less than 20% of tasks. They call this "the collaboration paradox." The report also predicts AI will handle COBOL fluently soon. Let's dig in. 🧵 resources.anthropic.com/hubfs/2026%2...

"Your coding agent is not malicious. It's amnesiac." mahdiyusuf.com/why-your-cod...

True story

Lots of chatter online about what people are seeing with the rapid evolution of #AI coding tools, but I don't see as much conversation about what these changes mean. Here's what I think it means for a sector that I have worked in on and off for my entire life: government. civic.io/2026/02/11/g...

I been saying this: "The SaaSpocalypse - The week AI killed software" www.fintechbrainfood.com/p/the-saaspo...

How government platforms make #AI coding assistants more effective. adhoc.team/2026/02/05/h...

Cool new feature to add agentic workflows to your GitHub repos. Another banger coming from the group at @githubnext.com and further validation that the future of software development is opening up for people that have developed the ability to communicate clearly. Words > Code github.github.io/gh-aw/

Astute watchers of the ESPN 30 for 30 "The Philly Special" will notice a special cameo by a quintessentially Philadelphia character: Joseph Salvatore Merlino. I think he has a steak shop now in Philly or something. Wild seeing him in this. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joey_Me...

If there was a snow shoveling event in the Winter Olympics, I'd crush that shit.

ESPN 30 for 30 episode on the iconic Philly Special play from Super Bowl 52 drops tonight at 9:30 PM EST. INJECT THIS DIRECTLY INTO MY VEINS!!! #GoBirds #30for30 www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVYa...

Good advice here: "Fully trusting the answer an LLM gives you is foolishness, but it’s wise to use an LLM to help navigate the way to the answer."

Sometimes you just have to "git checkout main && git branch -D your-old-idea" and start again...

Software development is changing, dramatically. "For the first time ever, good talk is exponentially more valuable than good code. The ramifications of this are significant and disruptive." nadh.in/blog/code-is... #AI #ChatGPT #Claude #LLMs #Coding

Super interesting study on the efficacy of different AI-coding assistant instruction methods. Big takeaway from this work - simpler is better. vercel.com/blog/agents-...

Hell yeah! #GoBirds #PhillyPhilly www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1SA...

We're experimenting with ways to keep AI agents in sync with the exact framework versions in your projects. Skills, 𝙲𝙻𝙰𝚄𝙳𝙴.𝚖𝚍, and more. But one approach scored 100% on our Next.js evals: vercel.com/blog/agents...

The cost of generating software code is collapsing, and governments aren’t ready yet for what that means. civic.io/2026/01/29/t... #AI #ChatGPT #Claude #CivicTech #SoftwareDevelopment

"The tools have changed, the craft hasn't" - good post on using AI-assisted coding tools.

If government software teams are going to use #AI coding-assistants for their work, and increasingly they are doing just that, then why not direct those AI tools to generate code and configuration files that are compliant from the start? mheadd.github.io/atlas-ato-ac...

The rapid evolution of #AI coding tools and increasingly sophisticated generative AI models has resurfaced the idea of “disposable software,” or designing for obsolescence. What does this mean for government software projects and how can spec-driven development help? civic.io/2026/01/26/d...

It's still early days, but the coding world is changing really, really fast. It just might turn out that the future of software development is... writing things down in clear, simple, documents that #AI tools can use to generate software. www.anildash.com/2026/01/22/c...

There is a great discussion in this article about how "close" code should be, how easy it should be for developers to inspect what #AI coding tools generate and to make changes if needed. This is pretty central in my view to the ongoing debate on AI-assisted coding. Distance to code.

I have Gas Town derangement syndrome and spent the last few weeks writing thousands of words on agent orchestration patterns; how they shift our bottlenecks and force us to ask whether and when we should stop looking at code maggieappleton.com/gastown

If you are doing spec-driven development, add this to your AGENTS.md file: #AI #Claude #ChatGPT #Copilot #Gemini

The state of legacy systems is one of the most critical technology challenges facing governments around the world today. I've worked for over 20 years in different government agencies, and everywhere I went, the struggle was the same. 1/2

Feels good to hold it in my hand.

Happy New Year! I'm excited to share something I've been working on for a while: my new book on modernizing legacy technology systems with #AI. www.amazon.com/dp/B0GFGTK6TG

Love this new project for spec-driven development (SDD). Not only because it makes working with #AI tools more logical and efficient, but because it enables developers and teams to treat the specification as the source of truth on system behavior, not the implemented code. github.com/Fission-AI/O...

Here's my enormous round-up of everything we learned about LLMs in 2025 - the third in my annual series of reviews of the past twelve months simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/31/... This year it's divided into 26 sections! This is the table of contents:

I wrote about 10 things Mamdani's incoming administration can do to transform how the city delivers to ensure his agenda becomes a reality. open.substack.com/pub/publicse...

Do you want to learn how to modernize legacy technology systems with simple hands-on training? Well, Happy Holidays, because I have a gift for you. 🎄🕎 1/4

I ❤️ Philly. #CivicHacking capitol of the world. www.youtube.com/watch?v=kD6N...

Fragments: Illustrated guide to mainframe modernization, what the second value of code reviews means for LLMs, LLMs write and then port an HTML parser martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

OpenAI aren't talking about it yet, but it turns out they've adopted Anthropic's brilliant "skills" mechanism in a big way Skills are now live in both ChatGPT and their Codex CLI tool, I wrote up some detailed notes on how they work so far here: simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/12/...

Most legacy government systems exist in a state of profound documentation poverty. The biggest potential value of using #AI to improve legacy systems will come not from transforming old software code into new software code but from compiling the knowledge of how a system actually works. spec-ops.ai