The Pragmatic Engineer

Anders Hejlsberg reflects on building Turbo Pascal, C#, and TypeScript, and shares what AI may change about the future of software engineering.

Does the noted “No Silver Bullets” paper by the author of a classic engineering book still hold up, 40 years later? Is AI the long-sought single silver bullet – or has one been around for years?

Also: Amazon finally allows engineers to use Claude Code and Codex, Meta forcefully assigns engineers to data labelling work ahead of layoffs, more small “AI-forward” teams, and more

How the cloud changes the way we build applications, and why engineers’ ethical choices matter more than ever. Excerpt from the book, ‘Designing Data-Intensive Applications’, 2nd edition

Also: Anthropic’s speed run to break devs’ goodwill, big price increases from GitHub Copilot, Mitchell Hashimoto on the “building block economy,” and more

Mario Zechner, creator of Pi, joins Armin Ronacher to explore AI coding’s limits, arguing that human judgment still matters most in an agent-driven world.

A deepdive with the Canonical team into how AI is changing Ubuntu, why they’re betting on local-first LLMs, and a look into other Linux distributions

Details from 15 tech companies on the rapid growth of token spend, and their responses to it. Also: AI vendors can’t keep up with demand, plummeting morale at Meta, and more.

Martin Kleppmann on scaling, his updated Designing Data-Intensive Applications, and what’s next for AI-era systems.

Steve Huynh, formerly Principal Engineer at Amazon, shares observations from 10+ years of interviewing software engineers, and an excerpt from his new book, Technical Behavioral Interview

… which will probably be the shortest-lived trend because it’s so wasteful. Also: coding AI agent subsidies could be ending, Cal.com going closed source and blaming it on AI, and more.

Our AI tooling survey finds concerns about mounting AI costs, more engineers hitting usage limits, and AI tools having uneven effects upon different types of engineers