Monthly updates
The monthly, mostly noise-free roundup of what actually happened in AI-assisted engineering. One post per edition of the matrix - what shipped, what it means, and what we changed our minds about because of it.
October 2026 · v1.7 · October 1, 2026
What top engineers read about AI in September 2026
System One - The Cheap Brain and the Control Plane
The monthly reading list that pairs with the VISDOM AI maturity matrix. Essays, reports and papers that engineers actually read and argued about this month, and what they add up to. No chasing every model, no top-50 lists, no marketing. In September they add up to a split: the agent's brain came apart into a cheap fast half and an expensive slow one, control moved into a single layer of gateways and identities, and that layer became the thing attackers went for first.
Read postSeptember 2026 · v1.6 · September 1, 2026
What top engineers read about AI in August 2026
The Factory Floor - Verification Gets Machinery
The monthly reading list that pairs with the VISDOM AI maturity matrix. Essays, reports and papers that engineers actually read and argued about this month, and what they add up to. In August they add up to one question that five different organisations were arguing about without noticing each other: where does verification capacity come from, now that writing the code is the cheap part?
Read postAugust 2026 · v1.5 · August 1, 2026
What top engineers read about AI in July 2026
Own the Outer Loop - The Verification Turn
Every month I dig through what serious engineers actually read and argued about - not the model launches, not the top-50 tool lists, not the marketing. July's reading had one through-line: generation stopped being the constraint a while ago, and this was the month the industry admitted, in writing, that verification is. The autonomy you can grant your agents equals what you can cheaply verify. Not one step more.
Read postJuly 2026 · v1.4 · July 1, 2026
What top engineers read about AI in June 2026
Bring It Home - The Sovereignty Turn
The monthly reading list that pairs with the VISDOM AI maturity matrix. No chasing every new model, no "top 50 tools," no marketing - just the essays, reports and talks that engineers actually read and argued about this month, and what they add up to. This month they add up to one thing: you rent the model, but you own the building.
Read postJune 2026 · v1.3 · June 1, 2026
What top engineers read about AI in May 2026
The Bill Comes Due - Fleets Shipped, and So Did the Invoice
The monthly noise-free roundup of what actually happened in AI-assisted engineering. This edition: every vendor shipped a fleet of agents as the default product, Uber's COO went on the record asking whether any of it is worth the money, and two separate research groups proved that the two things you trust to keep agents honest - your test suite and your config files - both quietly lie to you.
Read postMay 2026 · v1.2 · May 1, 2026
What top engineers read about AI in April 2026
Trust, but Audit - When the Agent Has a Bad Day
The monthly noise-free roundup of what actually happened in AI-assisted engineering. This edition: a Senior Director at AMD measured 6,852 sessions to prove the agent had been having a worse month than usual; Anthropic shipped the first public engineering postmortem for an AI coding tool; and Pawel Dolega did the math on how long flat-rate AI subscriptions can keep being a thing.
Read postApril 2026 · v1.1 · April 1, 2026
What top engineers read about AI in March-April 2026
The Sobriety Update - From Ad-hoc Copilot to Self-Driving Codebase
The monthly noise-free roundup of what actually happened in AI-assisted engineering. This edition: someone leaked Claude Code's source, someone else got a $3,800 overnight bill, and the first real data on AI code quality made everyone quietly close their "10x developer" slide decks.
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