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Issue 332: The boring reality of AI

When novelty of AI fades, what we’re left with is the boring realities of enterprise workflows: back-office automation and payroll support. This Overflow is dedicated to those little, boring realities of this modern era of AI—the things that may not make us all 10x developers, but do make our work just a little bit easier.

First up, we have a two-for-one pod episode for you with Dataiku’s Florian Douetteau on serious agentic systems and 1Password’s Nancy Wang for a conversation on making agent swarms secure. Peter Salanki, CTO and co-founder of CoreWeave, sat down with us to discuss production-ready AI and avoiding the trap of over-architecting. On the blog, we’ve got our latest Stack Overflow Knows survey on agentic AI in the workplace, a piece on the artisan vs. builder dichotomy, and the first ever best-of round-up from The Heap, our engineering blog for everyone by our community.

The realities from the world wide web are just a little more interesting—we’ve got articles on everything from extreme tokenmaxxing and sleepy LLMs to the positives of letting your kids run around alone outside. Plus, there’s nothing boring about the questions and answers coming from our community. They’re sharing their knowledge about Speedos in China, ignored resignation letters, and the will of the dead. If you’re looking to escape your boring AI reality, head on down below because we have all of that and more ready for you in this week’s newsletter.

From the blog

Best of the Heap: First post of the past

Let's take a moment to shout out all the articles we’re seen posted so far and encourage folks reading to reach out about your own.

The find out stage of AI is just supply chain and password protection

In this two-for-one special recorded at HumanX, Ryan is joined by Dataiku’s Florian Douetteau to chat about the governance, orchestration, and data requirements for serious agentic systems and 1Password’s Nancy Wang for a conversation on making agent swarms secure.

In an AI world, the most valuable developers will be both artisans and builders

If AI is the new power tool for developers, is there still value in artisanal craft when anyone can be a builder?

Agents on a leash: Agentic AI remains mostly single-agent and monitored at work

AI’s impact on software engineering continues, and more and more of that AI is packaged as agents as results from our newest pulse survey show agentic usage has almost doubled (59%) since we last asked about it in our annual Developer Survey

Do you have what it takes to run AI in production?

From the floor of HumanX, Ryan Donovan is joined by Peter Salanki, CTO and co-founder of CoreWeave, to chat about what it really takes to run AI in production; the growing importance of observability, utilization, and scheduling; and Peter’s advice for avoiding the trap of over-architecting too early.

Interesting questions

Why is "the ball of the foot" called as it is?

Actually it’s because it’s the big baller, shot caller part of the foot.

I announced my resignation . . . and was completely ignored. What to do?

Would, “As per my last email…I’m out of here!” not work?

Can a will be written so that it overrules the wishes of certain survivors?

This just in: dead people don’t suddenly own more now that they’ve died.

Should I bring Speedos or swimming shorts to China?

“Enjoy your time here and wear whatever you like.”

Links from around the web

Mystery company accidentally blew $500 million on Claude AI in a single month — failed to put usage limit on licenses for employees

Why couldn’t they “accidentally” give me $500 million?

The cost of safetyism

Kids need to go and touch grass.

Using AI to write better code more slowly

AI, better code, and slowly aren’t mutually exclusive.

Do language models need sleep? Offline recurrence for improved online inference

If I’m taking a nap and my AI agent is taking a nap, who’s raising shareholder value?

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