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📚 Software Engineering Articles

🗞️ Tech and AI Trends

👨🏻‍💻 Coding Tip

  • Use native <dialog> with showModal() for accessible, focus-trapping modals without libraries

Time-to-digest: 5 minutes

Speeding up agentic workflows with WebSockets in the Responses API 🕷️

OpenAI's Codex agent loops dozens of back-and-forth API calls to complete tasks like debugging code. Each request validates, processes, and sends the full conversation history; a massive overhead that was eating latency gains from faster inference speeds. They needed to move the bottleneck away from the API layer.

The challenge: When inference speeds jump from 65 to 1,000 tokens per second, repeated API overhead becomes the wall you hit, not the model. You can't just make each request faster—you need to eliminate redundant work entirely.

Implementation highlights:

  1. Persistent WebSocket connections: Replace synchronous HTTP calls with a single long-lived connection that maintains state across the agent loop lifecycle

  2. In-memory response caching: Store previous response state (tokens, tool definitions, sampling artifacts) on the connection to skip rebuilding full conversation history

  3. Minimal API surface: Use familiar response.create + previous_response_id Instead of new async patterns; developers integrate without rewriting code

  4. Selective reprocessing: Run safety classifiers and validators only on new input, not the entire conversation history every round

  5. Overlapped execution: Handle non-blocking work (billing, logging) asynchronously while subsequent requests are already processing

Results and learnings:

  • 40% end-to-end speedup: Agent workflows became dramatically faster across Vercel SDK, Cline, and Cursor integrations

  • Infrastructure matched inference: Hit the 1,000 TPS target for GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark with bursts reaching 4,000 TPS in production

  • Developer adoption was instant: Zero-friction migration path meant adoption ramped up immediately across the community

OpenAI proved that when your model gets faster, your infrastructure has to get faster too. Smart API design isn't about adding features—it's about removing friction so users actually feel the speed they're paying for.

Record, generate, run: AI-powered UI test generation for iOS

Discover how Grab's innovative Mobile UI Testing AI Workflow transforms the way developers create and execute UI tests. By leveraging AI-powered automation, our system captures real user interactions to generate comprehensive, executable test scripts in minutes. Join us on this journey to enhance test coverage, improve reliability, and accelerate development cycles. Dive into our blog post to learn more about the architecture, best practices, and how you can be part of this exciting advancement in mobile app testing.

AWS Distinguished Eng: Learnings From 3000 Incidents And How Engineering Is Changing | Marc Brooker

Where caching is bad, thoughts on the industry, and learnings across his career

The 20 Software Engineering Laws

A field guide to why software projects fail, systems rot, and teams slow down.

A Well-Designed JavaScript Module System is Your First Architecture Decision | CSS-Tricks

Behind every technology, there should be a guide for its use. While JavaScript modules make it easier to write “big” programs, if there are no principles or systems for using them, things could easily become difficult to maintain.

The Complete Guide to Inference Caching in LLMs

Inference caching reduces latency and cost by storing and reusing computation from previous LLM requests instead of recomputing everything each time. It operates across three complementary layers: KV caching within a request, prefix caching across shared prompts, and semantic caching that reuses full responses for similar queries.

Optimizing Effective Training Time for Meta’s Internal Recommendation/Ranking Workloads

ARTICLE (ai startup vibes)
How an AI-Native Startup From SF Works and Builds Its Product

ARTICLE (self-care code edition)
Build yourself flowers

ARTICLE (images go squish)
The end of responsive images

ARTICLE (robots do chores)
Agents as scaffolding for recurring tasks

ESSENTIAL (time money brain hurt)
Extreme Time Value of Money: Late-stage Career Planning

ARTICLE (stories go zoom)
Interactive Storytelling for the Web: Building Immersive Stories with Timelines, 3D, and Layered Scenes

ARTICLE (remote dev nest tour)
A Deep Dive into My Remote Development Setup

ESSENTIAL (sql brain juice)
Mastering CTEs in SQL

ARTICLE (data oopsie traps)
The 5 Silent Failures in Data Pipelines

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🤖 DeepSeek Launches V4 Flash and V4 Pro AI Models to Challenge OpenAI and Anthropic (3 min)

Brief: China's DeepSeek unveiled its V4 Flash and V4 Pro series, claiming they're the most powerful open-source AI models, featuring improved coding benchmarks, advanced reasoning capabilities, a new Hybrid Attention Architecture for better conversation memory, and a 1 million-token context window that allows entire codebases to be processed as single prompts.

🤖 Meta Cuts 10% of Workforce to Double Down on AI Race (3 min)

Brief: Meta is laying off 8,000 employees (10% of workforce) starting May 20 and canceling 6,000 open positions as it pivots aggressively toward generative AI to catch competitors like OpenAI and Google, following multiple smaller cuts since January.

🤖 OpenAI Launches GPT-5.5 With Advanced Coding and Research Capabilities (2 min)

Brief: OpenAI unveiled GPT-5.5, its latest AI model excelling at coding, computer use, and research, now rolling out to paid subscribers across ChatGPT and Codex, as the company races to compete with rivals like Anthropic's Claude Mythos amid intensifying competition in the AI sector.

💰 Amazon Pumps $25 Billion Into Anthropic as AI Infrastructure Race Heats Up (3 min)

Brief: Amazon is doubling down on AI infrastructure with a $25 billion investment in Anthropic (on top of $8 billion already committed), while Anthropic pledges to spend over $100 billion on AWS services over the next decade and secure 5 gigawatts of capacity for its Claude AI models—a massive power play as tech giants race to build out AI infrastructure.

🤖 'Tokenmaxxing' Goes Wrong: How Tech Giants Gamified AI Spending Into Massive Waste (8 min)

Brief: Tech companies including Meta, Microsoft, and Salesforce created internal token leaderboards to boost AI adoption, but the gamified competition backfired spectacularly—engineers are now burning billions in tokens on throwaway work just to climb rankings, with Meta alone spending 60.2 trillion tokens monthly (potentially $100M+ in costs) on largely wasteful tasks while only Shopify's approach with circuit breakers and transparent oversight proved effective at avoiding the trap.

🍎 Tim Cook Steps Down as CEO, John Ternus Takes the Helm at Apple (3 min)

Brief: Apple announces Tim Cook will become executive chairman while John Ternus, senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, becomes CEO effective September 1, 2026, following a long-term succession plan that grows the company from $350B to $4 trillion in market cap under Cook's 15-year leadership.

🤖 SpaceX and Cursor Team Up to Build the World's Best Coding AI (2 min)

Brief: SpaceXAI and Cursor are partnering to develop advanced coding AI by combining Cursor's AI software platform and engineer user base with SpaceX's Colossus supercomputer (equivalent to a million H100s), with SpaceX holding an option to acquire Cursor for $60 billion later this year.

This week’s tip:

Use the native <dialog> element with showModal() and inert attribute to create accessible, focus-trapping modals without third-party libraries, ensuring proper ARIA semantics and keyboard handling. Browsers automatically manage focus-within-dialog and backdrop interactions.

Wen?

  • Focus management: showModal() automatically traps focus and restores it on close; no manual tabindex juggling needed.

  • Form submissions: Using method="dialog" simplifies close handling and value passing to parent scripts.

  • Multiple modals: Nested dialogs with inert on backdrop content prevent interactive elements outside active dialog from receiving focus.

Your dream has to be bigger than your fear.
Steve Harvey

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