Idéias, Dicas, Spring, Design, JEE, SOA, Metodologia e Processos de software.
In the summer of 2024, I wrote 300+ AI POCs; in 2 years, I have 550+ AI pocs. Before I cover the lessons learned, we need to address somethings. I've been learning technology for the past 23 years since I started working professionally with software; I never stopped. I always learned multiple languages every year and always liked to explore , even before AI. For 19 years(since 2007), I have…
More tokens are not more intelligence. Still, it is easy to get hooked on token usage. Is it learning, experimentation, or just FOMO? Subscription models trained us to extract as much as possible from a fixed monthly payment. But when more usage creates more code to review, why do we need to max everything out? Are we getting more from AI? Or are we repeating an old consumption habit with a new…
Ambiguity is not simply having a difficult problem. It is not knowing exactly what the problem is, what matters most, or which direction will create value. It appears during requirements, scoping, analysis, and design—across the whole solution space. It also appears across teams: product, design, engineering, and the business. Ambiguity has always been one of the hardest parts of engineering.…
Software engineering keeps changing names for the same old problems. Before 2023, changes were introduced with some level os stability; now, changes happen much faster, to the point that we do not really understand the problems. We had those problems in the past, considering things like (agile/scrum, microservices, devops), but never has it been a fast loop like this. First, we had scripting. Then…
Harness Engineering is pretty trendy at the moment. Harness engineering is a way to better drive or operationalize an LLM model. The idea is that you are renting an LLM model as a service, but you own the harness. The harness is a way to be less dependent on the model (LLM). LLMs are not deterministic at all, and they are not general intelligence; they are pretty limited to their training data.…
AI everywhere, agents everywhere. We just finished the first quarter of 2026, and a lot happened in those first 3 months. It feels like 3 years have passed, not three months. Opus 4.6 really changed the game, but software engineering and distributed systems are not solved by agents; we saw hype at the top of the hype, with huge, unrealistic expectations that need to be dialed back and properly…
Engineers never liked doing code reviews. Especially if there were lots of files, you got fewer reviews. That was so 2023. Today, in 2026, AI Coding agents generate most of the code, and the code review problem is much worse than it ever was. Paddo captures very well the disaster that is Amazon Kiro and Spect Driven Development. Everybody believe that code review is a bottleneck; let's be honest…
People building agents today are mostly doing one-shot. Meaning they write one and that's it. Yesterday, I was watching the YC Lightcone podcast: "Inside Claude Code With Its Creator Boris Cherny" and one of the things Boris, creator of Claude Code and head of Claude Code in anthropic, said is that they delete the CLAUD.MD a lot because they want the new models to take over. That insight tells us…
AI coding Agents like Claude Code , OpenAI Codex , and Gemini CLI have disrupted how software engineering is done. IMHO, the most disruptive agents are Claude code and Codex. However, a lot of things already happened, some progress has been made, and there is some evolution in the space. We saw the birth of custom and subagents to avoid passing the whole context window down, custom commands to…
The One does not simply use AI Agents in production. Before using AI agents in production, we need to understand that LLMs are token prediction machines and by nature are non-deterministic . No matter how good you specs are, AI will drop packages and make mistakes. Lack of determinism is just one aspect we need to keep in mind. We also need to keep in mind that it's very easy to jailbreak the…
Imagine you are coaching a basketball team. You want to train your team to be good at 2-point shooting from the inside. Now imagine for some weird reason you can't test that, and you need to play a whole 4 quarters basketball game in order to be able to maybe, with a lot of luck, score 2 points. That would suck, right? This actually sounds insane because we all know we can skip the whole game and…
From time to time, the industry has a breakthrough, and things change. Sometimes the improvement is incremental, and other times it is very disruptive. Not all change stays forever; actually, new technologies tend to die sooner than old inventions like dishes, forks, knives, spoons, glasses, and many more. I remember web services dominating the corporate universe until rest came and put them to…
For a long time, software engineering had a stable way of doing software. Yes, not all companies had the same level of maturity and properly digested previous movements like Lean, Agile, and DevOps. However, right now we are living in a quite interesting time when we are reconsidering what we know and what worked in the past in favor of perhaps a better way to build software. Fully acknowledge…
AI might reshape how engineering works; there might be different workflows and different ways of shipping software. We have good and solid foundations in engineering, which are still relevant and can still guide us even in AI agentic times. If we go back more than 30-20 years, the traditional way of building software was highly influenced by RUP . From RUP come phases, roles, responsibilities, and…
Almost 3 years ago, in 2023, I wrote a blog post about the death of code review . It hasn't been that long, but software engineering has changed a lot in the last 2 years, and there is a tendency to change even more in 2026. Back in 2023, I was not even talking about AI being the "killer" of code review; it was a series of things: people not paying attention, LGTM without any effort, and a lack of…
IF you talk with engineers, software architects, managers, pretty much everyone, the answer will be the same: they are not happy with shared environments. We can narrow down shared environments to common envs like dev, test, stage, demo, etc Pretty much all non-prod environments suck. That is the reality in our technology industry. I don't think I ever liked any env in any company, so think about…
PMI has a whole discipline about risk management. The DevOps movement has several principles to reduce operational risk, such as continuous deployment, infrastructure-as-code, progressive rollout patterns, traffic splitting, and more. Financial institutions might terminate or restrict business relationships with clients and even categories of clients to eliminate risk, hence derisking. Risk…
Distributed Monoliths are a significant source of technical debt and a major anti-pattern. Distributed monoliths have the worst of both monoliths and Microservices . It's very easy to create distributed monoliths because often people don't learn proper principles, and mistakes keep happening over and over again. Distributed Monoliths are everywhere: on DevOps solutions , on the Frontend , even in…
Rainy Days Some places have more rain than others. Some cities or regions have rainy seasons; one way or another, rain will happen. Either because it is in the season or because the players are traveling to play, and there is rain where they are right now. Considering software engineering rainy days for me, it's like one of these everyday moments: ● Having personal issues ● Having health issues or…
I wrote my 5th book! The Art of Sense: A Philosophy of Modern AI - take a look here . This book is free; it's me giving back. I hope you like it. It's my second git book; the first git book was SAL . AI is one of my new passions; this book will help you in your journey. If you are not a data scientist, this could be a good starting point. If you are already a scientist, it could be a chance to…
Many people think that today, Gen AI is the revolution of the machines. That AI will make an engineer 3-5x more productive. Well, that’s not true and not even close to being true. Let’s pretend it’s true for one moment, then we can apply some scale economics to Generative AI, especially with AI coding agents like Claude Code or OpenAI Codex. Let me be honest: I don’t think that using AI you can…
I wrote my 4th book! Diego Pacheco's Software Architecture Library (SAL). This book is free; it's me giving back. I hope you like it. It's my first git book. Architecture is one of my passions; this book will help you in your journey. If you are not an architect, this could be a good starting point. If you are already an architect, it could be a chance to learn something new. You don't need to be…
One common mistake engineers make is to test mocks. However, would you know what the right principles are and how to spot good or bad tests according to these principles? IF you don't have first principles, you are very likely shooting into the dark. In Brazil, we have this metaphor that if you play chess with a pigeon (I will use a chicken in this post), you will very likely lose because the…
No. This is not a blog post about AI. However, this title could be easily confused with a famous AI paper about transformers, Attention is All You Need ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 ). Perhaps the machines know something we dont. In all seriousness, attention or focus is really a prerequisite for engineers. In order to understand complex tasks, make sense of complicated systems full of…
AI Agents and vibing are growing in popularity. It's time for us to think about what use cases make sense to use them and what use cases it would be a mistake to use them. AI is changing how people work, learn, and behave. Should I vibe or not vibe? Vibing can be useful when AI Agents have limits. Vibe coding has several drawbacks, including security challenges, hallucinations, and incorrect…