State of Software Engineering in 2026: A Reality Check Beyond the AI Hype Three and a half years ago, Matt Welsh, PhD and former Google engineer, published "The End of Programming" in Communications of the ACM and declared that classical computer science was over. The meteor had hit. Engineers were the dinosaurs. The state of software engineering in 2026, he implied, would look nothing like what
GitHub Copilot just got a lot more complicated — and not in a good way. If you tried to sign up for Copilot Pro recently and hit a wall, that's not a bug. GitHub quietly paused new sign-ups for Copilot Pro, Pro+, and Student plans starting in late April 2026. No end date announced. No workaround offered. Just a message and a door that won't open. That alone would be worth covering. But they made t
Book: TypeScript in Production Also by me: The TypeScript Library — the 5-book collection My project: Hermes IDE | GitHub — an IDE for developers who ship with Claude Code and other AI coding tools Me: xgabriel.com | GitHub You have seen the shape of this incident before. A 500 lands in production. The frontend says "checkout failed". The Hono service that owns /checkout called the prici
Every observability vendor has bolted "AI" to their landing page. Half of those features are genuine improvements. The other half are autocomplete in a costume. After a few years of running these tools across enterprise estates, here is where AI-augmented SRE actually pays off, where it doesn't, and what we'd advise teams adopting it today. The single most defensible use case. A medium-sized estat
Iris v0.4.0 ships today. It's the release where protocol-native eval crosses from "deterministic rules" into "semantic scoring" — without giving up any of what made the deterministic layer work. Three headline features plus a lot of infrastructure work that quietly compounds. I'll go through each, why it matters, and how it fits the thesis. Heuristic rules catch a lot: length, keyword overlap, PII