The DX AI-assisted engineering: Q4 (2025) impact report offers one of the most substantial empirical views yet of how AI coding assistants are affecting software development, and largely corroborates the key findings from the 2025 DORA State of AI-assisted Software Development Report: quality outcomes vary dramatically based on existing engineering practices, and both the biggest […]
Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of strong opinions on AI assisted coding. Some engineers swear by it. Others say it’s dangerous. And of course, as is the way with the internet, nuanced positions get flattened into simplistic camps where everyone’s either on one side or the other. A lot of the problem is that people […]
Some argue that even if the current AI boom leads to an overbuild, it might not be a bad thing – just as the dotcom bubble left behind the internet infrastructure that powered later decades of growth. It’s a tempting comparison, but the parallels only go so far. The dotcom era’s overbuild created durable, open […]
This is one of the most important pieces of writing I’ve read on AI – and that’s not the kind of thing I say lightly. If you’re leading in a business right now and looking at AI adoption, it’s worth your full attention. Duncan Brown’s Team dynamics after AI isn’t about model performance or the […]
The idea of LLMs as a new abstraction layer for software development keeps coming up. On the surface it sounds appealing. Just as compilers turn source into binaries, AI could turn prompts into systems. You store the prompts, they become the source of truth, AI generates the code and the code just becomes an artefact. […]
The recent DORA 2025 State of AI-Assisted Software Development report suggests that, today, only a small minority of the industry are likely to benefit from AI-assisted coding – and more importantly, avoid doing themselves harm. The report groups teams into seven clusters to show how AI-assisted coding is shaping delivery. Only two – 6 (“Pragmatic […]
I don’t think people fully appreciate yet how agentic AI use cases are restricted by what Simon Willison coined the “lethal trifecta”. His article is a bit technical so I’ll try and break it down in more layman’s terms. An AI agent becomes very high risk when these three things come together: Each of those […]
Yet another study showing that AI-assisted coding isn’t resulting in any meaningful productivity benefits. Faros AI just analysed data from 10,000+ developers across 1,255 teams. Their July 2025 report: The AI Productivity Paradox confirms what DX, DORA and others have already shown: GenAI coding assistants may make individual developers faster, but organisations are not seeing […]
Most code is crap, most developers are mediocre. In the age of AI-assisted coding, that’s a problem for them and the industry. Like many people, I’ve been of the belief that AI would not replace developers. I still don’t think it will – at least not directly. What it will do is change the economics […]
A constantly updated list of guides and best practices for working with GenAI coding assistants. These articles provide practical insights into integrating AI tools into your development workflow, covering topics from effective usage strategies to managing risks and maintaining code quality. Importantly, the authors of all these articles state they are continually updating their content […]