🦸 Community Superhero
Our community superhero this week is Allie Joy Tsahey, founder of Baddies in Tech. Allie created Baddies in Tech to build a space where women in tech can connect, grow, and feel seen in an industry where that hasn’t always been the case. What started as a response to her own experience has grown into a thriving community centered around support, access, and opportunity 💙. Allie spends her days actively building inclusion into our community and is a genuine inspiration to us all. She is absolutely someone worth following if yo don’t already. Thank you so much for everything you do, Allie!
💯 Spotlight
If you want to see the ideal type of content this newsletter was built around, Brian Tarbox did an exceptional job last week. His post uniquely points out how AI monocultures threaten the future of innovation by comparing our industry to the farming industry in the early 19th century (yes, seriously). Oddly enough, the same patterns are emerging in our use of AI-generated content as they did when blight took out a whole year’s worth of potatoes way back when. This wonderfully written blog is aimed at content creators everywhere, gently warning us to preserve our voices as an individual and to stay creative. Bravo!
🔥 My Favorite Content
I’m always inspired by innovations that turned out to be relatively simple answers to big problems. I discovered a great example of this last week in a post from Sam Marsh about how they cut agent token costs by 98% by changing error response format. When an error occurs in Cloudflare, instead of responding with a giant block of html with a buried error message, they swapped over to an RFC 9457-compliant standard, which cut token count down from 14k to around 200! They even offer two formats of their responses (markdown or json) based on preferences of the calling model. This is intelligent API design at its finest, and reinforces the importance of APIs during the rise of agentic usage. I will be modeling my projects after this format in the future!
Have you tried a voice-to-voice AI app yet? Me neither, but I feel like I’m reading about new ones every week and they’re getting me excited for what’s to come. Last week, Vivek V shared the story of how he built a real-time voice AI confession guide app for iOS. The article talks heavily about bugs that almost made it to production, but I found the best parts to be near the end where Vivek talks about the important configuration for Nova 2 Sonic, how to approach echo cancellation, and what he’d do differently. These are real problems with this mode of communication and it’s great to see the thoughts from someone who’s building with it.
I wrote an article last week talking about an AI agent I built that had a principal identity in my system vs giving it a bunch of super-user API keys. I’ve almost fallen victim to the same security nightmares we see all over the internet because “easy” is faster than “right.” Full disclosure, the opportunity to build it was thanks to a sponsored request from Teleport, but I actually learned a lot about the security posture of AI agents and what to look out for when granting them access to a production system. My story talks about an agent I built to be on call and troubleshoot issues that arise in my apps, read logs, and change code to remediate them. Fun read, if nothing else.
💡 Tip of the Week
I generally consider myself an advanced user of AI coding agents, but this adoption maturity model from Addy Osmani puts me at level 5 of 8 🤯 Where do you sit on this scale?
🐣 New Releases
Reminder, all releases from AWS can be found on AWS News by Luc van Donkersgoed. Below are my favorite from last week.
Lambda increased the file descriptor (FD) limit to 4096 on Lambda Managed Instances. This is great news for functions running intense I/O workloads at high concurrency rates. If you’ve ever had to troubleshoot an FD issue in Lambda before, you’ll be grateful for this update!
AgentCore Runtime now supports managed session storage for persistent agent filesystem state. This means filesystem data your agent writes can persist across runs as long as you reuse the session id. Huge capability here!
AWS released an agent skill for building with serverless, including all the capabilities you’d hope for like how to build with durable functions, proper API gateway to backend resources, and best practices for observability, performance, and troubleshooting.
Last Words
I continue to be fascinated at how the serverless community has turned into the Gen AI community, and it makes sense. Most of the capabilities we’re getting from vendors are, in fact, serverless. Simple API calls that abstract infrastructure ownership and free you to move faster than ever before. How are you feeling about this crossover? Do you agree with me or think they’re still separate? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
That’s my take on the week, but what’s yours?
What did I miss? What made you nod along (or 🙄)? Hit reply if you’re reading the email. Prefer socials? Ping me on Twitter, LinkedIn, or email.
Happy coding!
Allen