2025

This month I want to highlight a blog post, Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign, by Anthropic. Anthropic details a cybersecurity attack – orchestrated using Claude – which discovered and attacked security vulnerabilities at incredibly high speeds with minimal human interaction. Using AI to increase attack effectiveness is expected; it has been predicted for years…

This month I want to highlight a blog post, Finding the sweet spot for using AI as a developer, by Ole Herland. This article recounts a developer’s journey from AI skeptic to AI proponent. All it took was a gentle nudge from a friend, and an open mind. As someone who traveled a similar path around AI,…

This month I want to highlight an article that caught my eye, ‘Myth:’ BMW Says Apple CarPlay Isn’t As Popular As You Think, by Jeff Perez. This short article quotes a BMW SVP on their internal data regarding Apple CarPlay usage, and their subsequent conclusions. When I read the headline, I found myself immediately rejecting BMW’s data-driven…

This month I want to highlight a video, The Misconception that Almost Stopped AI, by the Welch Labs YouTube channel. This video explores gradient descent – the method by which large language models (LLMs) are trained. Oftentimes I use my monthly articles to share a topic and apply my own learnings. This month I am sharing this…

This month I want to highlight a video, ‘Forbidden’ AI Technique, by Chana Messinger on the Computerphile YouTube channel. This short video discusses the fascinating problem of penalizing chain-of-thought AI models for admitting their hacks inside their intermediate reasoning scratch pad. Chain-of-thought AI models are trained to think “out loud,” and we naturally want to use that…

This month I want to highlight a video, Is RL + LLMs enough for AGI?, by the Dwarkesh Podcast, featuring Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken. This video explores recent advancements in AI from a scientist’s point of view, which I find particularly refreshing given how much AI chatter today is aimed at selling services. One topic…

This month I want to highlight an article, AI 2027, by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, and Romeo Dean. Full disclosure, this article is a fictional work (a first-time departure from my typical recommendations), however I would more accurately label this article informed fiction since it leverages trend extrapolation, expert feedback, and the authors’ personal OpenAI experience. This…

This month I want to highlight a video, XZ Exploit, by Dr Richard G Clegg on the Computerphile YouTube channel. This video discusses a hack from one year ago that almost created a backdoor to millions of computers across the world. The hack was found in a test environment prior to release but came close to…

This month I want to highlight an article, The Software Engineering Identity Crisis, by Annie Vella. This article explores the value we derive from software engineering, how AI is fundamentally changing that value proposition, and how we can adapt to continue meeting our core needs as engineers. This article challenged me to deeply consider how I…

This month I want to highlight a video, Build software that lasts!, by the Changelog YouTube channel. This excellent video features Bert Hubert, an accomplished technologist. In this interview Bert shares his hard-earned wisdom on several topics, all of which resonate with me as an experienced software developer and leader (note: this interview is over an…