Present a good team with problems & they'll thrive on finding solutions. Ask them to implement your solution & they'll only find problems.

What would you need to put in place before you trust your agent with your architecture? We dig into it with Matt Erman @codeliftsleep, Senior Software Engineer at @Blackboard, on The Next Commit, and the deep dive breaks down how he builds that confidence from evidence, small steps and automated checks. Read the deep dive: thenextcommit.substack.com/p…

Developers fear what agents will do to their architecture, but agents can be great architects if you give them constraints to work within! 🎙️ My guest on The Next Commit this week is @codeliftsleep. Matt Erman is the author of Grokking Software Architecture. He shares some wise words on how we can maintain good architecture in the age of agents. Listen: thenextcommit.substack.com/p…

How do your teams stay aligned at agentic speed in a highly competitive industry? substack.com/home/post/p-218…

Time for a Next Commit deep dive into how @SonarSource's very own Quentin Chevrin uses agents to develop the billing system for SonarQube. It includes a great clip from the podcast in which Quentin explains how he scopes his prompts and prepares his commits and PRs for review. thenextcommit.substack.com/p…

I’m excited to share this week’s The Next Commit episode where I interviewed @SonarSource's very own Quentin Chevrin. Quentin has taken a very thoughtful and considered approach to adopting agents and I loved this very honest conversation. Have a listen: thenextcommit.substack.com/p…

Not a podcast person? Prefer a long read, or asking Claude or GPT to read it for you? I’ve written a deep dive into this week’s The Next Commit episode with Michael Tweed. We explore how Skyscanner turns local AI experiments into shared engineering practice, and how engineers’ work shifts toward guiding agents and verifying what they produce. thenextcommit.substack.com/p…

Are your teams sharing how they work with agents? Today on The Next Commit, Michael Tweed explains how @Skyscanner turns local experimentation into shared skills, infrastructure and standards without imposing one workflow on every engineer. thenextcommit.substack.com/p…

One run won’t tell you how coding agents work. You need repeated experiments and traces to see the patterns. I burnt some tokens benchmarking agents and reasoning settings with Sol. Codex and I wrote up what changed when I turned reasoning effort up and down: thenextcommit.substack.com/p…

If you’d prefer a long read to this week’s @TheNextCommit podcast, here’s my analysis of the conversation with @tottinge. Agents don’t make XP obsolete. They give testing, refactoring and evolutionary design new leverage, while making human judgement matter more. thenextcommit.substack.com/p…

With the right guidance, agents can write quality code at extraordinary speed. Tim Ottinger (@tottinge) gives them room to work, but there’s one situation where he always tells them to stop and collaborate. Can you guess when? thenextcommit.substack.com/p…

I’ve written about what I took from my conversation with Ian Johnson, Staff Engineer at Parento and author of ‘Harness Engineering’. Ian employs small tickets, honest coding rules, layered checks and a development system that learns from its mistakes. Or, as Ian puts it, “building the thing that builds the thing.” Read: substack.com/home/post/p-214…

The Next Commit is live! This new podcast and newsletter is about how software engineering is changing with AI, told by the engineers doing the work. Our first guest is Ian Johnson, author of Harness Engineering. Watch and subscribe: substack.com/home/post/p-214…

I’ve been working on something new with some incredible colleagues at @Sonar. Looking forward to sharing it with you tomorrow.

I have @reach_vb to thank for persuading to move away from the CLI and embrace the @OpenAI Codex app. I now spend my whole day in it and it just keeps getting better. If you're stuck in the CLI give it a try!