Adventures In Software Development
I started running about a year ago. I had always hated the idea of it. I started anyway because I needed some exercise and running was the only thing I could practically fit in. No gym, no kit faff, no booking anything. Put shoes on, leave house. For the first six months I did it [ ]
The Software Delivery Lifecycle (SDLC) document sitting in your governance folder is one of the most useful tools in the business. Most orgs never use it that way. They treat it as a compliance box ticking exercise, and teams see it as a governance burden at best. The SDLC is a value stream. Once you [ ]
GenAI coding tools are genuinely powerful. In the right hands, in the right environment, the stuff is remarkable. Experienced engineers with good practices around them are doing things in hours that used to take weeks. Ideas get tested that previously stayed as hypotheses. Long-standing technical debt is getting cleared. Work that wasn t worth the investment [ ]
Anthropic s Claude Code pricing fiasco is what it looks like when a company is squeezed at three ends. Anthropic quietly removed Claude Code from the $20 Pro plan, making it exclusive to the $100 and $200 Max tiers. Their Head of Growth framed it as a small test on 2% of new signups (which didn t [ ]
The UK s AI Security Institute has published the first independent evaluation of Claude Mythos s cyber capabilities. The headline finding first AI model to complete a full 32-step simulated network attack is notable. But there s a finding buried in the accompanying methodology paper that puts it in a rather different light. On current pricing [ ]
You may be seeing posts claiming METR s widely-cited 2025 study has been followed up with new research showing an 18% productivity boost. That s not what the article says. METR: We are Changing our Developer Productivity Experiment Design In 2025, METR found experienced open-source developers using GenAI were 19% slower and notably, developers themselves thought [ ]
CircleCI s 2026 State of Software Delivery report has two findings that are already travelling: AI is meaningfully boosting software delivery, but only 1 in 20 teams are capturing that benefit. Both claims are more uncertain than the report suggests, for different reasons. What the report is measuring The report s primary metric is throughput the [ ]
According to the FT, demand for software engineers is rising again, and in relative terms is outperforming the wider jobs market. That’s the headline most people will take away. But the more important detail is that the growth is concentrated in more experienced roles, while entry-level hiring remains weak. That broadly lines up with a [ ]
Parkinson’s Law is mainly interpreted as people fill the time available . That line was really only a hook. The original paper is really about how organisations create extra work and headcount for themselves, regardless of whether there is more genuinely useful work to do. As organisations grow, work often grows around the work itself [ ]
This is a cross post of an article I wrote for Ada, the National College for Digital Skills All the available evidence suggests that GenAI-assisted coding is most powerful in the hands of highly experienced software engineers, while having neutral or even negative effects for less experienced ones. It’s easy to see how this may [ ]