SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

Cursor's latest agent-swarm experiment rebuilt a SQLite-like database from documentation and passed a held-out conformance suite. The bigger story is the shift from assigning code tasks to specifying, measuring, and governing a goal.

Armin Ronacher's new essay explores the tension between letting AI agents loop autonomously and maintaining the engineering comprehension that makes software maintainable. The Hacker News discussion adds practical caveats worth reading.

Martin Fowler reframes AI-era debt into three layers - technical, cognitive, and intent. The third one is the one most teams are silently accumulating. Here is what it is and how to diagnose it.