software development Articles
Lovelace’s Objection Still Shapes 5 Big Questions About AI
I recently learned that in 1843, Ada Lovelace translated an Italian mathematician’s paper from French into English. As if that’s not impressive enough, she added her own notes, which ran about three times longer than the paper itself. One of them, Note G, held a table often described as the first computer program. It also […]
AI pair programming: punching above your weight class
Understanding your strengths and weaknesses as well as those of your agents can allow you to slay dragons together.
A Million Lines of Markdown and No Code
I recently learned about a company that has rebuilt waterfall from scratch – on purpose, with AI – while believing they’re doing the most modern software development possible. The oldest failure in software process, the one we spent fifty years learning our way out of, wearing this year’s tooling. And the AI is executing it […]
Your AI Agent Doesn’t Have a Capability Problem. It Has a Communication One.
I keep hearing some version of the same complaint. It still produces slop. My job is clearly safe for a while longer. It couldn’t handle the simplest request. Some days it just seems… off. The easy conclusion is that the model isn’t good enough yet. A better one is coming, and it’ll finally get out […]
Faster Coding Means Slower Everything Else
At some point in the last year, my work changed: I was spending more time reviewing code than writing it. I can’t point to the moment it happened, there was no process change, no deliberate decision… I just looked back at the last year and noticed what had happened. Once I noticed it, I started […]
Custom AI vs. Off-the-Shelf: Stop Asking If, Start Asking Where
A client came to us with a clear vision: build a scheduling app for their staffing business, complete with a natural language interface so managers could describe scheduling constraints in plain English instead of wrestling with a GUI. They knew exactly what they needed custom AI for. They were wrong. Custom AI is software built […]
We’re Picking Tools for a Different Developer Now
A colleague of mine, Joe Coy, recently told me something that stuck with me. His team had chosen Maestro over Appium for mobile UI testing. The team’s reasoning made a lot of sense: Maestro was lightweight and easier to set up. By every traditional measure, it was the right call. Then they started using an […]
How to Hire a Custom Software Development Firm (No Technical Background Required)
A Note From the Author: As SEP’s Director of Marketing, I conduct all of our mid- and post-project client interviews. The same theme comes up again and again from people who went through this process for the first time: they had no idea what to look for, and no one made it easy to figure […]
Agentic Bug Fixing Experience Report
We recently released our first beta build to our client’s QA. Their Software Development Product Manager knows her failure cases inside out and quickly compiled eight tricky bugs. We wondered how the Agent would handle them. Gotta start somewhere We took her bugs as a list of platforms and what she found. We wrote (I […]
The Workflow That Teaches Itself: A Self-Improving Agent Workflow
There’s a wave of writing right now about “harness engineering” — the idea that the infrastructure wrapped around an AI agent matters more than the model underneath it. The data is hard to argue with. Vercel deleted 80% of their agent’s tools and watched accuracy jump from 80% to 100%. OpenAI published a dedicated post […]
Treat Your AI Workflow Like You Treat Your Code
I kept having the same argument with Claude. Not a dramatic one. More like the low-grade friction of a coworker who keeps formatting the PR description wrong no matter how many times you fix it. The AI would reach for the wrong abstraction. I’d correct it. Next session, same mistake. I’d correct it again. And […]
The AI Collaboration Paradox
One of our teams at SEP has gone all-in on agentic development. I don’t mean they’re simply using AI tools heavily; I mean they’re deliberately redesigning their team processes, shared infrastructure, and ways of working around it. When I was talking to the team about their experiences, one thing kept jumping out at me: AI […]