Dasith Wijesiriwardena (@dasiths) - The stories of a .NET developer with a focus on distributed systems and the cloud
The fastest way to start checking an architectural rule is to ask the model. The expensive part is asking the model to keep rediscovering facts a tool could have measured. A good inferential sensor should mature: keep the model for judgment, and move the ruleable parts into deterministic checks.
Coding agents can produce a lot of code quickly. That is useful, but it also creates a simple problem: how do you know the work is correct before the agent moves on? Backpressure gives the harness a way to slow the agent down when the work has not been proven yet.
I had the opportunity to speak at DDD Melbourne 2026 about something that has consumed a lot of my thinking over the past year: how we actually get reliable results out of AI coding agents on real, messy codebases. The talk was titled “Throw Away The Vibes: Context Engineering Is All You Need,” and it distilled the practical lessons I have gathered while working on hypervelocity engineering…
A story about what it really takes to send someone to do a job for you, and why that turns out to be a genuinely hard problem we’re now being forced to solve because of AI agents. Prefer to click through it? There’s an interactive presentation of this post that walks through the same story slide by slide. AI agents are software that doesn’t just answer questions, it goes off and does things for…
I’ve been exploring hypervelocity engineering workflows with AI agents like GitHub Copilot, and one fundamental challenge continues to surface: maintaining shared context alignment between developers and AI. While AI excels at generating code, it lacks inherent “memory” of past interactions and the nuanced understanding that humans naturally build over time. This alignment gap grows wider as…
I, along with my colleagues Jason Goodsell and Juan Burckhardt, had the opportunity to present our key insights and learnings from the rapidly evolving world of Large Language Models (LLMs) at Apidays Australia 2024 in October. The talk, titled “Lessons from the Trenches in a LLM Frontier: An Engineer’s Perspective,” shared our experiences from the front lines of developing LLM-powered solutions.…
My team at Microsoft Industry Solutions Engineering have recently been building heaps of LLM based solutions for customers of varying sizes across industries. There are some patterns that are emerging from these solutions and today I wanted to write about a pattern we used at a customer to prevent a class of prompt injection attacks with regards to tool use. Some of it may seem trivial or just…
I presented some my learnings around modern software supply chain security tools and landscape at API Days Australia 2023 and K8SUG Meetup in November. I had my team co-present the topic with me this time. My team in Microsoft Industry Solution Engineering have been building solutions to enable government and defence customer teams in Australia and secure software supply chains have been the main…
Most systems we build today are delivered as containers. Container registries and associated technologies are an important cog in this ecosystem. As the container ecosystem matures, there is an increased need to consume associated artefacts like Helm packages, software bill of materials, evidence of provenance, machine learning data sets etc from the same storage. There are even upcoming use cases…
I recently spoke at API Days Australia about my experiences building distributed systems and some challenges my team faced deploying and running them on the edge. It is not an exaggeration to say that most modern systems that teams build are running on the cloud in a distributed architecture. There are some well-known successful practices around DevOps for these cloud native solutions as well. But…