Casey West

There's a beta Compute Engine endpoint that answers "can I get twenty Spot VMs of a given machine type in this region right now?"

You went to Spot VMs for the discount and did the homework: checkpoint code, a drain handler, a preemption survived.

"Percent of code AI-generated" is this era's lines-of-code: easy to compute from a diff, trivially gamed, and silent on whether anyone can explain the system in six months.

In one week of late-August 2026, Agent Sandbox, Kueue, and LeaderWorkerSet each shipped a limiter on their own elasticity: a warm pool that refills more slowly, a field that used to be editable and is now frozen, and an autoscaler that ships with a guard…

A timestamp records when a wiki page was written.

Every resilience pattern you know assumes the machine shows up.

Agent density is a lifecycle problem, not an isolation problem.

I'm hiring a Senior Developer Relations Engineer for GKE and AI Infrastructure.

The finale of the series: the mature end-state the first three parts build toward.

Parts 1 and 2 argued that a capability's trust boundary is a separate decision from the model's.

On February 23, 2026, Google quietly made the retention terms for Grounding with Google Search better: the window dropped from thirty days to up to three, and what's kept narrowed from your prompts and output to short-lived debug logs.

The builder's companion to Governed Growth—the same reference repo from the implementer's chair.

Opening a platform to more teams and more models—first-party and partner, such as Gemini and Claude—quietly assumes those capabilities share one trust boundary.

GitHub's REST and GraphQL APIs have separate hourly rate limits—two budgets, not one.

Traditional SDLC fails for autonomous AI.

A deep-dive playbook for building scalable, enterprise-grade AI agents.

Explore the evolution from basic LLM interactions to crafting sophisticated System Instructions, and discover how meta-prompting—using AI to refine AI prompts—can unlock more powerful and collaborative AI agents.

Stop wrestling with Python versions and dependencies.

A case study on migrating a decade-old Jekyll website to Astro in just 3 days by partnering with AI (Google Gemini) for planning, coding, and building custom development tools.

Moving beyond superficial 'culture fit' towards shared values for building truly inclusive and effective teams.

It's not inherently harder to be a tech lead while remote or on a distributed team – it's more deliberate.

Wait an hour to ask for help.

Tech leadership is a critical discipline we need to cultivate.

The point of test driven development is not to do testing; it's to learn about the quality of our design.

The delivery of meaningful value to customers requires the actions of both people and technical objects.

A contemporary look on Brooks' essay No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering