The Journal.
Thoughts, research breakdowns, and updates from the collective.
The Pulse: a trend of trying to cut back on AI spend within eng departments?
Top-down and bottom-up efforts to rationalize AI token spend, interesting AI coding stats from Cursor, GCP suspends $2M/month customer without warning, and more
Building OpenCode with Dax Raad
Dax Raad, co-founder of OpenCode, joins the show to discuss their explosive growth, the limits of AI coding tools, and why engineering judgment still matters.
State of the software engineering job market in 2026
A deepdive into today’s tech jobs market, with exclusive data on software engineering jobs, the AI engineering boom, whether AI engineering is “replacing” software engineering hiring, and more
The Pulse: Antigravity 2.0 takes ‘IDE’ out of its new IDE
Negative feedback greets Google’s redesigned AI IDE, why Google’s product ecosystem is so chaotic, Meta cuts 10% of staff as it hits record revenue and profits, and more
Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhl
Alice Ryhl from Google’s Android Rust team explains why developers love Rust, and what makes the language so powerful for building reliable software.
AI’s impact on software engineers in 2026: key trends, Part 2
Tradeoffs of AI tooling, why adopting AI at company-level is hard, what’s changed in two years, and more. The third and final part of a series analyzing our 2026 AI survey results
The Pulse: Forward deployed engineering heats up again
Also: a look into rising tech job losses, self-reporting 100% AI usage at big companies, vibe coding & agentic engineering merging, and more
TypeScript, C# and Turbo Pascal with Anders Hejlsberg
Anders Hejlsberg reflects on building Turbo Pascal, C#, and TypeScript, and shares what AI may change about the future of software engineering.
Revisiting “No Silver Bullets” in the age of AI
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?
The Pulse: Did capacity shortages turn Anthropic hostile to devs?
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
Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Cloud & Doing the Right Thing
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
The Pulse: AI load breaks GitHub – why not other vendors?
Also: Anthropic’s speed run to break devs’ goodwill, big price increases from GitHub Copilot, Mitchell Hashimoto on the “building block economy,” and more
Building Pi, and what makes self-modifying software so fascinating
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.
How will AI change operating systems? Part 1: Ubuntu and Linux
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
The Pulse: AI token spending out of control – what’s next?
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.
Designing Data-intensive Applications with Martin Kleppmann
Martin Kleppmann on scaling, his updated Designing Data-Intensive Applications, and what’s next for AI-era systems.
Learnings from conducting ~1,000 interviews at Amazon
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
The Pulse: ‘Tokenmaxxing’ as a weird new trend
… 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.
The impact of AI on software engineers in 2026: key trends. Part 1
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
DHH’s new way of writing code
David Heinemeier Hansson shares why he shifted to an agent-first AI workflow, and what it means for how software is built and who builds it.