Srikanth Sastry

AI coding agents appear to unlock the promise of converting natural language to code; that's the whole value proposition of "vibe coding".

A flurry of bills, drafts, and executive orders on AI have dropped across the US and EU in the past couple of months.

This is happening to me often enough to where I need to understand it.

Spec-Driven Development (SDD) has become the new cool thing to try in AI-assisted software development.

We have all seen AI agents make 'mistakes' in ways that introduce bugs and then try to cover their tracks by deleting or updating the tests or evidence.

In his book The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond came up with Linus's Law: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."

A previous post discussed how AI threatens the legal basis and enforcement of open source.

The step function increase in AI's ability to generate code is looming over open source.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and this post is not advising any technical implementation in pursuit of any privacy regulation.

I've been writing about directive governance and subsidiarity in software organizations.

This is the third post in the series about directive governance.

Every software system is designed around an assumption about its actors; the ones who use the system, and what drives their behavior.

Most large tech companies operate top-down.

In the tech industry, we have been through a corporate rollercoaster in the last few years.

Reality is an entity of vast, irreducible complexity.

Defense-in-depth—borrowed from military and security strategy—means layering safeguards so that if one fails, another takes over (Cloudflare, Wikipedia).

I ran into one of those delightful bugs that only show up in dynamic task generation of your data pipelines — the kind that teach you how a leaky abstraction in your pipeline platform can have you scratching your head in confusion.

The problem Recently, I encountered a subtle performance issue while refactoring some C++ code.

After I moved my website from Wordpress to Jekyll, I hadn't changed the theme for nearly 5 years.

What even is Cyclomatic Complexity?

I have seen way too many 'senior' engineers get bug fixing wrong.

At work, I had a customer team that aspired to be “customer first.”

The Law of Demeter essentially says that each unit should only talk to its 'immediate friends' or 'immediate dependencies', and in spirit, it is pointing to the principle that each unit only have the information it needs to meet its purpose.

You service may be massive, but it's public API surface is pretty small; it has just a handful of APIs/endpoints.

Almost [by definition]({% post_url 2022-06-18-defining-unit-tests-two-schools-of-thought %}) unit tests should be isolated from its (external, shared) dependencies.