The Software Development Monthly is a monthly blog post that shares interesting or useful content which I consumed during the previous month. This blog post is always published on the eight day of the month.
Let's begin!
AI
Why I stopped using AI code editors warns that overusing AI code editors can lead to a loss of technical intuition and fundamental engineering skills.
Writing code was never the bottleneck argues that writing code faster is a reasonable goal, but it doesn't eliminate the real bottlenecks. The author identifies some of these bottlenecks and describes how we can remove them with Claude Code and Github Actions.
AI Use at Work Is Causing "Brain Fry", Researchers Find, Especially Among High Performers explains that constant interaction with AI tools can lead to cognitive overload, fatigue, and slower decision-making.
How I Dropped Our Production Database and Now Pay 10% More for AWS is a post mortem of an incident where a Claude Code agent wiped the production AWS infrastructure (including the database) and deleted all automated backups.
The Software Development Lifecycle Is Dead argues that AI agents have collapsed the traditional software development lifecycle into a tight loop of intent, execution, and observation.
Every layer of review makes you 10x slower explains how every layer of approval drastically decreases our velocity, and argues that even though AI can generate code faster, the only way to sustainably increase velocity is to do fewer reviews.
AI Agent Hacks McKinsey: 5 Situations When You Should Not Deploy Agents identifies five situations where we shouldn't use AI agents.
AI won't make you rich. But fixing bugs in AI slopware will argues that debugging and stabilizing AI generated code will be the next big economic opportunity for developers.
If you thought the speed of writing code was your problem - you have bigger problems argues that if we increase the amount of generated code with AI without addressing the real bottlenecks, we will only create "traffic jams" which reduce the amount of delivered value.
AI Coding is Gambling describes how coding has changed from an act that requires thinking to a form of gambling where developers pull a slot machine for solutions, and argues that this process makes the development work less satisfactory.
AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder. argues that AI tools have made code generation faster, but the software engineering role has become more taxing, and the AI tools have caused an identity crisis for developers who love writing code.
Anatomy of the .claude/ Folder provides a comprehensive tutorial to the contents of the .claude/ directory. For example, the author provides an introduction to commands, rules, skills, and agents.
Thoughts on slowing the fuck down warns that agentic code generation can create unrecoverable technical debt, and argues that we should slow down and put the developer back to the driver's seat.
AI Tools for Developers Are Not Enough explains that even though teams can generate code faster than ever before, this doesn't guarantee that they will solve the right problems. The author argues that if we want to build the right thing faster, we need AI tools which support the whole software development lifecycle.
Writing an agent skill explains how we can optimize Claude Code's token usage by writing agent skills.
Claude Code Template for Spring Boot introduces the author's Claude Code template for Spring Boot applications. This template leverages both agents and skills, and its goal is to help us to generate production ready Spring Boot applications.
Cloud
Bucketsquatting is (Finally) Dead defines the term 'bucketsquatting' and explains how AWS solved this issue by introducing account specific S3 namespaces.
Software Development
Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity argues that engineering culture often values over-engineering and ignores the value of simple solutions.
Things I miss about Spring Boot after switching to Go identifies six Spring Boot features the author misses and highlights three things Go does better.
XML is a Cheap DSL argues that XML is an effective tool for building domain-specific languages.
Start naming your useEffect functions, you will thank me later argues that naming useEffect functions makes our code cleaner and helps us to identify effects that shouldn't exist.
The junior developer pipeline is broken, and nobody has a plan to fix it explores the problems caused by the collapsing junior developer hiring pipeline and identifies solutions that could help us solve them.
GitHub Actions Is Slowly Killing Your Engineering Team compares GitHub Actions and Buildkite, and argues that we should use Buildkite instead of GitHub Actions.
JavaScript (No, Not That One): Modern Automation with Java highlights modern Java features that have transformed Java into a viable scripting language.
Don’t trust, verify explains why we should verify that the tools we use were released by the correct "source" and haven't been tampered with.
axios Compromised: npm Supply Chain Attack via Dependency Injection is a comprehensive analysis of the supply chain attack where the popular axios NPM package was used to deliver malware.
Post Mortem: axios npm supply chain compromise is the official post mortem of the axios supply chain attack.
Announcing grüt - A Terminal File Explorer with Git, GitHub, and AI Integration introduces a new terminal-based file explorer that works in Linux, MacOS, and Windows.
Java 26 Is Here, And With It a Solid Foundation for the Future summarizes the key changes and new features introduced in Java 26.
Feeling Left Behind in Tech? This Is Your 90-Day Comeback Plan introduces a structured 90-day strategy that helps experienced developers to modernize their skill sets.
Speed up Java Startup with Spring Boot and Project Leyden explains how we can achieve up to a 75% faster startup time for Spring Boot applications.
Managing Sensitive Data in jOOQ 3.21+ Logs describes how we can exclude sensitive data from jOOQ logs.