adam bien's weblog

Java's open ecosystem—specifications, source code, JSRs, JEPs, mailing lists, MicroProfile, and Jakarta EE—made it an ideal training ground for LLMs.

A clarifying question from the agent costs a full round trip.

Before LLMs a senior engineer carried the architecture in their head, and a deviation from it cost typing effort.

Subscribe to airhacks.fm podcast via: spotify| iTunes The #414 airhacks.fm episode with Gunnar Morling (gunnarmorling) about: Hardwood, a minimal-dependency, multi-threaded Java library for reading and writing Apache Parquet files, and the lessons from the

Opinionated Spec-Driven Development, Kafkaesque JFR, zhtmldb Agent Memory--Questions for the 150th airhacks.tv Questions and topics for the 2026.09/150th edition of airhacks.tv: Another take on opinionated Spec-Driven development with Java Do we still need

Subscribe to airhacks.fm podcast via: spotify| iTunes The #415 airhacks.fm episode with Andy Damevin (ia3andy) about: Roq, the Quarkus static site generator, with Quinoa, the Web Bundler and Qute is available for download.

Subscribe to airhacks.fm podcast via: spotify| iTunes The #413 airhacks.fm episode with David Kral (Verdent) about: high performance JSON parsing without bytecode manipulation is available for download.

Most context engineering goes into supplying the model with knowledge.

"AI engineers" established a new genre of bragging: how little of the code was written by hand, what percentage the agent generated, how many days since the last manually typed line.

Subscribe to airhacks.fm podcast via: spotify| iTunes The #412 airhacks.fm episode with Simon Ritter (@speakjava) about: Azul's C4 pauseless garbage collector, the LLVM-based Falcon JIT compiler, ReadyNow warm-up elimination and the Cloud Native Compiler…

Java specifications, JSRs and JavaDoc have been publicly available, crawlable, versioned and consistently formatted for three decades.

Subscribe to airhacks.fm podcast via: spotify| iTunes The #411 airhacks.fm episode with Ian Rogers (in/irogers) about: Java API and type-system decisions in hindsight, from the String.substring change and CharSequence to biased locking, the Azul C4 read b…

abstract: Java's radical openness created the perfect LLM training ground: open specifications, open-source implementations, and the complete JCP including every JSR, JEP.

Subscribe to airhacks.fm podcast via: spotify| iTunes The #410 airhacks.fm episode with Steve Hannah (shannah) about: From PHP to Java: building Xataface and JDeploy, and grounding LLMs with Java standards for high-quality code generation. is available for

Docker's building best practices recommend multi-stage builds.

The 2026.08 / 149th edition of airhacks.tv with the following topics: "Spring Gateway vs nginx vs cloud API gateways: nginx and HAProxy as proxies, cloud gateways transforming HTTP into CloudEvents, authentication, JWTs and content-based routing, BCE as t…

Subscribe to airhacks.fm podcast via: spotify| iTunes The #409 airhacks.fm episode with Donald Raab about: the path from the Epson HX-20, dBASE, Clipper and Smalltalk to the origins of Eclipse Collections and Java lambdas is available for download.

Agents generate code in seconds, so investing in code quality looks obsolete.

Web frameworks solve human problems.

Questions and topics for the 2026.08/149th edition of airhacks.tv: BCE/ECB (Boundary-Control-Entity) for ...with static, semantic pages floci.io AWS cloud emulator "the role of the platform in LLM-assisted development" by Ondro at LinkedIn announcement: h…

The most asked BCE question is not what the layers mean, but which dependencies are allowed.

An agent running on the AWS Bedrock AgentCore Runtime has to implement a minimal HTTP contract: POST /invocations answers requests, GET /ping reports health, both on port 8080.

A business component is a package named after a single responsibility, and the structure of a system is the sum of these components.

The /aws-cdk skill generates and reviews Java AWS CDK v2 projects organized as BCE (Boundary-Control-Entity) business components.

Without further instructions, an agent writes web code from everything it saw during training: tutorials, framework docs, Stack Overflow answers, blog posts from 2014.

Subscribe to airhacks.fm podcast via: spotify| iTunes The #408 airhacks.fm episode with Olimpiu Pop (Olimpiu Pop) about: Enterprise Java LLM inference, grounding LLMs against normative Java and Jakarta EE specifications, using API and SPI separation and a…

A business component is a top-level package named after a single responsibility or feature, not after a technology. discovery, compiler, checkout, invoicing: reading the package names tells you what the system does.

The airails.dev skills ship as a single "Any agent" bundle: a zip that contains a skills/ folder.

Subscribe to airhacks.fm podcast via: spotify| iTunes The #407 airhacks.fm episode with Johan Haleby (@johanhaleby) about: Occurrent library, event sourcing, CloudEvents, the distinction between domain and integration events, CQRS versus CQS, and modelling

The structure of a system should reveal its purpose.

A business component (BC) is a package named after a single responsibility.

I noticed that coding agents reach for Quarkus developer mode by default.

zbaseline is a zero-dependency Java 25 CLI that fetches the complete web platform feature set (currently ~1,171 features) from the webstatus.dev API and renders it into a single markdown snapshot with the Google Baseline status of every CSS, HTML and Java…

The bce.design quickstarter lost its entire build system: Node.js, npm, rollup, lockfiles. 777 lines deleted.

Subscribe to airhacks.fm podcast via: spotify| iTunes The #406 airhacks.fm episode with Stanislav Bashkyrtsev (@sbashkirtsev) about: Testing terminology, avoiding mocks, mutation testing, Quarkus on AWS Lambda, generating JSON in PostgreSQL, GraalVM in the

DESIGN.md stores a design system as YAML token blocks inside a markdown file.

zws is a development web server in a single Java 25 source file on top of the built-in jdk.httpserver.

SBCE (say "space"), short for Spec-Driven BCE, is a workflow: every capability is declared as a single spec, and the spec is the boundary contract (package-info.java or package-info.md for Web Components) of exactly one Boundary-Control-Entity business co…

A Package per Feature made the case for the Business Component (BC): one package per responsibility.

A Package per Feature and Semantics over Bureaucracy showed BCE in a Java CLI application and claimed the convention is cross-technology.

Subscribe to airhacks.fm podcast via: spotify| iTunes The #405 airhacks.fm episode with Tomasz Ptak (/in/tomasz-ptak) about: A conversation on zero-dependency Java 25 automation, event sourcing with the Axon Framework, and stabilizing legacy Java systems,…

Subscribe to airhacks.fm podcast via: spotify| iTunes The #404 airhacks.fm episode with Thorsten Hoeger (@hoegertn) about: discussion about CloudFormation as underlying Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using JSON/YAML to define desired state, CDK introduction…

The 2026.07 / 148th edition of airhacks.tv with the following topics: Spec-Driven Development (SDD) on top of the Boundary Control Entity (BCE) pattern why decades-old, well-documented BCE (traced to Objectory, 1992) lets LLMs generate lean, idiomatic code

TLDR: a static site splits into business components (BCs), each a directory exposing an index.html built with semantic markup and web standards only.

A feature request never arrives as "change all DTOs", it arrives as "implement support for NVIDIA Nemotron".

jmarkdoc is a JavaDoc doclet that generates Markdown API documentation from Java sources and comments, ready for RAG pipelines, developer portals, and AI agents.

Questions and topics for the 2026.07/148th edition of airhacks.tv: airhacks.tv became a YouTube show Spec-Driven ("space" SBCE) BCE Demo VS Code Java tooling issues JMarkDoc announcement LightMetal and zsmith news BCE for ...static pages Time machine: 100…

SBCE is live at sbce.space (you say "space").

Subscribe to airhacks.fm podcast via: spotify| iTunes The #403 airhacks.fm episode with Daniel Tehorst North (@DanielNorth) about: discussion about pendulum swings in technology decisions, Kaikaku and Kaizen cycles, the Purpose Alignment Model for business

Subscribe to airhacks.fm podcast via: spotify| iTunes The #402 airhacks.fm episode with Holly Cummins (@holly_cummins) about: The move from application server classloader hierarchies to the flat Quarkus classloader, fast-jar and Project Leyden AOT, dev mo…