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Deep Engineering #65: Nikolai Kutiavin on Designing C++ Projects as Components, Not Files

On target-centric CMake, enforced dependencies, and search logic you can test without starting Qt
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Recent posts

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Governance Has to Become Infrastructure When Agents Write the Code
On why review processes built for human-paced development break under AI, and what it takes to make engineering standards enforceable by machines
 • Saqib Jan
EY Bounds Agent Autonomy by Risk, Not by Capability
On why the agent boundary is a governance decision, and what has to exist before enterprise AI moves past the pilot
 • Saqib Jan
Deep Engineering #64: Vijoy Pandey on How Team Topologies Strain As AI Shrinks the Delivery Unit
Inside the architecture of an organizational memory engine, the source hierarchy that governs what enters it, and the decision structure that routes…
 • Saqib Jan
37:35
How Cisco's Outshift Runs Engineering On AI Tiny Teams And A Memory Engine
Vijoy Pandey shrank his teams to five people and explains what that costs, and the memory engine and decision leads Outshift built to hold it together
 • Saqib Jan
Deep Engineering #63: Imran Ahmad on Building the Deterministic Shell Around an AI System
The model will still be wrong. Making sure the wrong answer cannot do anything about it.
 • Saqib Jan and Imran Ahmad
Reliable AI Systems Are Five Rings of Boring Code
On Input validation, context assembly, bounded control flow, output guards, and telemetry. About forty lines of ordinary software wrapped around one…
 • Imran Ahmad
How 10 years of C++ changed the way I see a C++ project
Component boundaries, target-centric CMake, and code designed for testability in a small Qt application.
Deep Engineering #62: James Ward on Wiring Agents to Tools, Data and Everything Else
A model is inert on its own, and most of what makes an agent useful is engineering that happens outside it
 • Saqib Jan
Agents Are Just LLMs With Integrations, Running in a Loop
On Tools, MCP, tool search, skills, memory, RAG and human in the loop, built with Spring AI and Java
 • Saqib Jan
Engineering Teams Are Paying Back Their AI Speed Gains With Interest on Review
Agents are opening pull requests faster than many development teams can verify them, and engineering leaders are absorbing the difference in review…
 • Saqib Jan
Deep Engineering #61: Sándor Dargó on Reviewing Code an Agent Wrote
What changes when the author accepted every line instead of writing it, and why useful comments need action, information, and a reference
 • Saqib Jan
Fix This Is Not Enough, Even When an Agent Wrote the Code
Reviewing AI-authored code increasingly means verifying intent, not just implementation. The AIR formula makes comments useful without turning them into…

Engineering Leadership

View all
EY Bounds Agent Autonomy by Risk, Not by Capability
On why the agent boundary is a governance decision, and what has to exist before enterprise AI moves past the pilot
 • Saqib Jan
Engineering Teams Are Paying Back Their AI Speed Gains With Interest on Review
Agents are opening pull requests faster than many development teams can verify them, and engineering leaders are absorbing the difference in review…
 • Saqib Jan
Forward Deployed Engineer Jobs Are Out There. Hiring Is Harder Than The Postings Suggest
On hiring for AI’s messy last mile, structuring deployment teams, and turning customer lessons into reusable product improvements
 • Saqib Jan
Materials Science Gets Real Value From Quantum Before Anything Else
Small molecule chemistry follows close behind. Optimization, cryptography, and machine learning all need thousands of logical qubits, so those sit much…
 • Saqib Jan and Sebastian Hassinger
Eighty Years of Boolean Thinking Is the Real Barrier to Quantum Adoption
The hardware is not the hard part for enterprises. Recasting business problems in quantum terms means unlearning assumptions about problem solving that…
 • Saqib Jan and Sebastian Hassinger
Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) Interviews Measure a Depreciating Skill
Notable engineering leaders on motivation, ambiguity, tribal knowledge and the measurement problem behind every reliability hire that did not work out
 • Saqib Jan
System Design Hiring Is Really a Judgment Test
Some repeat architecture while others jump straight to scaling, but the ones who stand out reason through failure, cost, and change.
 • Saqib Jan
How SUSE Runs AI Without Losing Control
Open source enterprises treat data sovereignty, MCP governance, and cost predictability as one connected problem
 • Saqib Jan

Interviews

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37:35
How Cisco's Outshift Runs Engineering On AI Tiny Teams And A Memory Engine
Vijoy Pandey shrank his teams to five people and explains what that costs, and the memory engine and decision leads Outshift built to hold it together
 • Saqib Jan
Multi-Agent Architectures in Production with Chi Wang and Xiao Ma
When one agent stops being enough, how to tell over-decomposition from under-decomposition, why observability moved from operations into design, and…
 • Saqib Jan
Quantum Computing Beyond the Hype with Sebastian Hassinger
How to tell genuine quantum progress from hype, why qubit count misleads, where the technology delivers value first, and how a classical developer…
 • Saqib Jan and Sebastian Hassinger
Database Choice, Lock-In, and the AI Rush with Peter Zaitsev
On why nobody owning Postgres became its advantage, the labels that sell you proprietary software, and what self-hosting costs once AI speeds up…
 • Saqib Jan
Tokens, Judgment, and AI Productivity with Austin Parker
On why a token is not a unit of intelligence, the illegible work token counts miss, pointing AI budgets at developer experience and observability, and…
 • Saqib Jan
Sovereign AI and Agentic Infrastructure with Rick Spencer
On running AI disconnected from the internet, the three-tier framework SUSE uses to match tools to work, why output metrics are vanity metrics, and MCP…
 • Saqib Jan
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