In the previous entry of the series, Bartek Antoniak shared his market-wide observations from the perspective of a professional software engineering and consulting firm. In the second article in the series, Peter Ratcliffe takes a deep dive into how AI has already reshaped the insurance industry, particularly the underwriting process.
Every morning, I scan Hacker News, newsletters, research, and weird corners of the web before preschool drop-off. I collect the gems that don’t make the headlines but teach useful lessons or spark technical ideas. Now I’m sharing them here. My rules are simple: no chasing every new model, no “top 50” lists, and no breathless marketing. Read on for this edition’s hand-picked stories and lessons. If that sounds like your kind of newsletter, welcome to issue two.
As part of our GitHub All-Stars series, where we examine open-source gems, I stumbled upon a project that strikes at the heart of one of the most fundamental problems in modern AI. After analyzing deepagents and its system-level approach to reasoning, the natural next step was to examine how we solve the problem… of memory.
The Insurance industry needs modernization. Current accelerated digitisation makes it hard for laggards to keep up. There is a clear efficiency gap that needs bridging. The market's connectivity is low-tech, hugely inefficient, and the market lacks the will to adapt to modern technology standards - particularly among traditional insurers that have expanded organically or through acquisitions.
Test suites have grown in size and complexity. What used to be a quick validation step has become a bottleneck that can significantly impact development velocity. The solution is to distribute test execution across multiple machines, running different test groups in parallel.
I’ve always claimed there’s no better way to learn anything than by building something yourself… and the second-best way is reviewing someone else’s code. From now on, every Wednesday we’ll pick one trending repo from the previous week and give it some attention: a tutorial, an article, or a code review - learning directly from its authors.
As we go full-AI mode, we want to inspire fellow developers with all the cool projects and experiments our devs are running with AI tools and agents. This is why we are launching the new series: “This Month We AIed” initiated by the Scala expert and SoftwareMill co-founder, Adam Warski.
This first edition curates in-depth, hype-free AI insights for engineers, from the pitfalls of multi-agent systems to the rise of AI-powered browsers. Expect contrarian takes, practical engineering tips, and real-world case studies over fleeting trends.
Explore how tool invocation works in LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT, blending prompt design with infrastructure. Understand the role of MCP in standardizing external tool integration for seamless AI-agent interactions.
Explore how MCP transforms JVM tools like WildFly and Ghidra into LLM-driven operations, diagnostics, and reverse engineering servers. Discover how agents can now run diagnostics, decompile malware, and even query applications—all via chat.
If you are using AI coding assistants or agents, they will only be as helpful as their knowledge of the libraries you use. LLMs know a lot about the world from their training set, but that might not include a library's documentation at all or include an older version. Agents can browse the Internet looking for more recent information, but this might not be precise enough. For instance, the web might be littered with outdated examples, and the latest information might only be available in the official docs. Hence, if you are a library author, how do you prepare your documentation for consumption by coding agents?
GenAI and LLMs are distinct AI models, but have so many commonalities that some users struggle to tell them apart. To find the right application for them in a business environment, we will discuss the differences between the two.
