I’ve been reflecting on a recent experiment building a multi-agent system that generates software from a product specification. What stood out was not whether it could produce code, it obviously can. What stood out was how quickly weak product definition showed up in the output. In the first version, the system produced something functional, but it was clearly built on incomplete assumptions.… Read more
What Building a Multi-Agent System Taught Me About Autonomous Software Development
In August 2022, before I was using AI this way, I wrote: “Computers do what we tell them to. We’re just not always clear with what we’re asking for.”
Building with AI has only made that more obvious.
In fact, it made something else clear too: even when we think we are being clear, there is still a lot of room for a system to interpret the request in ways that are technically valid and product-wise wrong.… Read more
Designing Resilient Scheduled Payment Systems
Scheduled financial transfers sound simple. A customer creates an instruction — for example, “transfer $100 every week” — and the system processes the transaction on the appropriate day.
Many systems begin with a straightforward implementation. A daily job reads instructions from a database, generates transactions, and attempts to process them. For a small system this can work well enough.… Read more
Great API Design Makes Hard Problems Feel Easy
Recently I started playing around more with my Neo Smartpen. The company makes their data storage format public and I wondered how long it would take me to write a program to show my handwritten pages within a simple app.
Given my background, I knew I could do this quickly in Java with a UI in Swing so I started there.… Read more