For decades, research in formal verification has been guided by a simple mental model that I recently coined the formal verification triangle. The triangle captures a trade-off between three desirable properties: Automation – the verification tool runs largely without human guidance Scalability – the technique works on large real systems Precision – the method can prove interesting properties, such as functional correctness Historically, verification techniques could reliably achieve two of the three, but not all three simultaneously.
Agile is dead. Not entirely, but as the de facto Right Way to Build Software™. As I've gotten deeper into agentic coding, it's gradually dawned on me how much agile development sucks in the era of AI. This is evident in the disconnect betw...
AI coding agents are important because they fundamentally alter what it is like to program. That is what this essay is about: not whether this transformation is good or bad for programmers as a labor bloc, or economically, or socially; not whether it makes us more or less productive in the odd Taylorist sense that seems prevelent whenever the subject pops up. What interests me and, I believe, should interest you about this whole enterprise, is the phenomenology of how this new human-machine asse...
RFD 576 Using LLMs at Oxide A thoughtful overview of how Oxide uses AI. It breaks down values, different uses, and reaches solid conclusions. It recognizes AI’s usefulness for some cases while keeping humans firmly responsible. Has the cost of building software just dropped 90%? AI’s explosion generates more demand for software by making it easier to build. A developer and business analyst can now ship an incredible amount at lower cost. What once required five people working for months now takes one developer and a part-time business analyst a week. Because creating internal tools and prototypes is cheap, more will get built. Smaller teams save money another way: less coordination. Fewer status meetings. Of course, developers now coordinate agents instead. I wonder whether ideas will be less polished when fewer people are involved before building starts. As Tim Cook says: You can go fast alone. You can go far with a team. Building the right thing still matters. “Because we can” is not a reason to build something. Horse The horse and chess analogies are interesting. They suggest that as new technology improves incrementally (~20% per year), it reaches a tipping point where it clearly becomes better than the older technology, and adoption is immediate. Cars improved steadily until they were clearly better than horses. On the next “replacement” cycle, most people traded their horse for a car. Chess programs improved beyond a threshold where they could beat a human most of the time. Now, regarding jobs and AI: answering questions from a knowledge base is a task where AI excels. As the author acknowledges, that part of his job is no longer something he does. He was “replaced” – but that was only part of his job. In fact, that wasn’t even the principal part: I was one of the first researchers hired at Anthropic. Presumably, everyone is happier that he can now focus on actual research instead of answering onboarding questions. My takeaway: AI is already changing some of o
Helping organizations transform their cloud infrastructure from good to exceptional. AWS Well-Architected team member sharing insights on cloud architecture, serverless, and software engineering.
Principal AI Architect. Creator of open-strix, a harness for building agent teams. Writing about AI architecture, stateful agents, and what happens when you give AI memory.
Formal methods, sounds very… formal! But I have been trying to explore what they are and so I decided to write down my learnings. Hopefully this proves a good starting point for someone else who is curious about the idea but doesn’t have a good starting point.
Why AI offense is beating defense and Verifiability is All You Need, how LinkedIn scales SAST to millions of LOC and 10k's of repos, atomic detection rules
Google Approach to Stopping Prompt Injection, Response to Cory Doctorow's Latest Book/Talk, AI Persuasion Risk, Screens Most Interesting Thing to Kids, and more...
