August 2026

This month I went to the Pacific Airshow! Great event, stayed at a hotel near by - a short walk to the beach where we could sit and watch the displays. My favourites would have to be: C17, Osprey, F35 - magnificent machine!!

Things I’m seeing/reading/watching/listening to in August 2026…

Videos

• How to Use Claude Code FREE Forever (Stop Paying $200/month)
  • A walkthrough of approaches for getting more out of Claude Code without the top-tier subscription.
• How to Build the Most Powerful System for AI Coding (Full Breakdown)
  • A full breakdown of assembling an end-to-end setup for AI-assisted development - the harness, context, and workflow around the model rather than the model alone.

Podcasts

Posts

• KotlinLLM is Going Open Source
  • JetBrains open-sources KotlinLLM (Apache 2.0), a research IntelliJ plugin whose “smart macros” delegate runtime logic to language models while keeping the generated code as explicit, persistent Kotlin source rather than hidden external workflows.
• Stripe and Sierra built their own coding agent systems. You probably don’t need to.
  • David Pan argues most organisations should buy an agent platform rather than build one - the differentiated value sits in the portable context layer (rules, skills, integrations), while the underlying infrastructure demands ongoing investment few teams can justify.
• When random.bytes() runs but doesn’t work
  • Dusty Daemon traces a COLDCARD firmware bug where the hardware RNG was inadvertently disabled, silently falling back to weak entropy for wallet seed generation - a cautionary tale about undocumented commits obscuring critical, security-sensitive changes.
• Are software engineers really engineers?
  • A LinkedIn discussion of the perennial question - whether writing software counts as “engineering” given the absence of licensure and physical constraints that define traditional disciplines.
• TDD inside the agent loop - theater or actual value?
  • Birgitta Böckeler runs experiments comparing TDD and non-TDD workflows for coding agents and finds “no clearly discernable difference” in output quality - the non-TDD solutions often ranked slightly higher.
• Agentic Engineering at Zalando: a snapshot
  • A candid look at Zalando’s 2.5-year rollout of agentic engineering across 250+ teams - the LiteLLM proxy, chat UI and CLI tooling, a deliberate vendor-independence strategy, PR-analytics-based impact measurement, and guild sessions and hands-on labs for knowledge sharing.
• A map of the most important skills in AI Engineering
  • Andrew Ng maps four AI-engineering skills drawn from 10,000+ postings and expert interviews - notably prompting isn’t one of them, and two of the four (using coding agents, shaping the build) are judgment skills that had no hiring category back in 2022.
• Two Flavors of Spec-Driven Development and Why I Clearly Prefer One
  • Simon Martinelli contrasts a task-driven, developer-centric spec model (optimised for fast code generation) with a stakeholder-centric one (optimised for alignment and long-term stability), and argues for the latter on business-critical systems.
• A Paper from 1995 Describes How You Should Work with AI Agents
  • Simon Martinelli revisits Kruchten’s 1995 “4+1 View Model” and argues its executable-views-plus-automated-verification ideas (via ArchUnit, Playwright and friends) are exactly how you should keep AI-assisted development honest.
• Spec-Driven Development and the AI Unified Process
  • Simon Martinelli on applying spec-driven development and the AI Unified Process to real Java systems.
• It’s time to rip off the band-aid and stop performing code reviews
  • A provocative argument that manual diff review has outlived its usefulness - with AI handling knowledge sharing, junior training and debt management, the claim is that engineers should reinvest that time into automated testing and analysis pipelines.
• Practical Loop Engineering
  • Addy Osmani on running AI agents in self-correcting feedback loops - distinguishing goal-based loops (bounded tasks with clear success criteria) from time-based loops (recurring, scheduled work), and warning against delegating judgment along with the task.
• Running local LLMs and prompt engineering
  • Mikhail Bogatyrev on local LLMs, prompt engineering and AI engineering in practice.
• The New Software Lifecycle
  • Addy Osmani argues AI shifts the bottleneck from code generation to specification and verification: “an agent is a model plus a harness,” where the 90% surrounding infrastructure (context, testing, evals) matters far more than the 10% that is the model.
• The New Software Lifecycle - slides
  • Companion slide deck for the talk behind Addy Osmani’s “New Software Lifecycle” writeup.
• Hardware researcher hunts the slowest x86 instruction
  • A “CPU deoptimization” project builds a hall of shame for the slowest single x86 instructions on modern processors - the worst offender takes 198 billion cycles, roughly 62 seconds, to execute.
• Ethereum, Render This: I Put an Entire React App Onchain
  • POIDHverse, a working React app, deployed entirely to Ethereum Mainnet by splitting it across 24 smart contracts - no traditional hosting, and it persists “for as long as Ethereum does.”
• Stop using JWTs
  • A well-worn argument that JWTs are the wrong tool for user login sessions - they lack the security properties session management needs, and plain cookie-based sessions remain the safer default.
• Relativistic Baseball
  • The very first xkcd What If?: what happens if you try to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light? Fusion, a thermonuclear fireball, and the destruction of the stadium and surrounding town.
• Discussion on r/ClaudeAI
  • A community thread from the Claude subreddit worth a read.
• 100 Most Watched Software Engineering Talks Of 2025
  • Tech Talks Weekly’s ranked roundup of the year’s most-watched conference talks from 100+ software engineering conferences - heavily AI-weighted this year, topped by a Werner Vogels AWS re:Invent keynote.

Books

• Claude Code: Building Production Agents That Actually Scale (Leanpub)
  • Thomas De Vos’s 518-page guide to the full production stack for Claude agents - tools, permissions, MCP servers, evals, observability and cost controls - drawing on real-world experience from regulated financial institutions across 31 chapters plus practical appendices.

Other

• jvm-skills
  • A curated catalog of agent-ready coding skills for the JVM ecosystem - searchable, installable guidance on Java, Kotlin, Spring, Gradle, testing and delivery, tuned for real production patterns across Spring Boot, Quarkus and Micronaut.
• skills.sh - The Open Agent Skills Ecosystem
  • A directory for discovering and installing reusable AI agent skills via a single command, with a popularity leaderboard (1.2M+ installs) and support for Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and others.
• AI Code Review (DeepLearning.AI)
  • A short course on using AI effectively for code review - providing repository context and building your own context-aware review agent to “catch the issues a diff-only review misses.”
• qm
  • A multiplayer agent harness for work: each person gets an isolated, personalised agent workspace (scoped memory, files, permissions, sandbox) while collaborating through Slack and web interfaces.
• coleam00/skills
  • Cole Medin’s collection of 33 agent skills - modular markdown procedures forming a practical “AI layer” around a prime → plan → implement → validate → review → commit → PR workflow.
• microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners
  • Microsoft’s 18-lesson course taking developers from AI-agent fundamentals through to production deployment, with written lessons, videos and code samples on the Microsoft Agent Framework.
• codebase-memory-mcp
  • An MCP server that indexes a codebase into a persistent knowledge graph across 158 languages - structural analysis, semantic search and architecture visualisation for coding agents, with no external APIs or language runtimes required.