🦸 Community Superhero

Our community superhero this week is Jordan Harband, open source architect at Socket and Board Member of the OpenJS Foundation. Jordan helps maintain over 500 open source packages and has heavily shaped the JavaScript ecosystem as we know it today. If there’s anyone worthy of a community superhero, it’s him. Thank you so much for everything you do, Jordan!

💯 Spotlight

Nothing makes me happier than seeing a builder tackle a problem they’re having head on. Pekka Malmirae published an article last week detailing a continuous glucose monitoring platform he built when the one he had been using got a little too expensive. He walks through how he used Kiro to remake it with AWS serverless services, but the great part about this post is the walkthrough of troubleshooting and fixing bugs Kiro introduced that skyrocketed the cost to run. It’s an excellent reminder that “trust but verify” is still very much a thing, even with the latest frontier models.

🔥 My Favorite Content

I don’t normally share content that is clearly written by AI or that smells like a product pitch, and I’m about to highlight an article that is both 😬. Sarvar Nadaf is building a tool/SaaS that gives AI agents easy, real access to a browser and published an article last week going through how it works and what you can do with it. The product, BrowserAct, uses a real Chrome instance under the covers, bypassing bot detection and CAPTCHAs in most web sites. The promise is awesome, it automates manual daily workflows and summarizes activities, it allows you to turn workflows into Skills for your agents, and it hands off to a human when it gets stuck. These are all great for friendly intentions. It scares the living heck out of me for malicious users and what they can do once agents have the real power of the browser. Thoughts were flying through my head as I read this, and I recommend you do as well.

Social media and blog sites like Medium and dev.to are full of complaints and observations that AI has virtually eliminated the coding bottleneck and moved it towards review. But that’s all I see, problems with no solution. Until last week when Jacob Verhoeks published an article that suggests we need to rethink software design for the agent era. Instead of adapting processes to something that has completely changed, Jacob thinks we need to completely change the parts that humans are involved with. There’s a lot to unpack in this article but it’s well worth the read with an open mind. I really, really like this.

There’s a real problem in our industry. With AI taking the helm of many coding jobs, what happens to the junior developers? Where is the next generation of engineers going to get their experience from? Chris Allmark wrote a great piece on filling the AI experience gap weighing in on the topic. I don’t want to spoil his positioning here, but I feel like he did an exceptionally good job framing the problem and offering a guess as to how things will be changing over the next 15 years.

I read a hot take from Chris Farris last week. He states that AWS destroyed the value proposition for Bedrock recently. With the recent launch of Fable 5, AWS requires you to opt-in for data retention that’s shared with Anthropic for 30 days and subject to human review. Now, this is a mandate from Anthropic rather than AWS, but the door has been opened. And sharing data with providers kills the neutrality benefit of Bedrock, which is the whole claim in Chris’s post. Well worth the read, and I’m right there with him on his opinion.

💡 Tip of the Week

I read a terrifying post on LinkedIn last week from Bob West that feels like it should be polarizing, but it’s grounded in a lot of truth. I like the contrarian opinion he comes in with and backs it up with an educated story on what’s really going on in the world.

Last Words

We were AI heavy this week, and for good reason. Things seem to be moving faster and faster with AI recently, and I’m hearing two main themes in the chatter: lowering AI spend and reducing model latency. Both of those go hand in hand, but there’s lots of nuance that goes into each of them. I’m curious on your thoughts on all this.

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