Read what ships.

01GitLab · tutorial

PHP2Shell: GitLab helps find and remediate critical PHP flaws

Critical remote code execution vulnerabilities known as PHP2Shell affect the PHP engine across multiple versions, requiring immediate runtime updates to fixed versions or patched distribution packages. The team utilized platform features like container scanning, code search, and automated agent workflows to locate PHP projects and remediate vulnerabilities. Operators must also check logs and environments for signs of compromise as framework updates and input validations cannot prevent these engine-level flaws.

DEPTH ■■■■■10 min read3 days ago

ArchitectureSecurity

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02Martin Fowler · architecture

When Software Meets Hardware

A software engineering team modernizing a large-scale retail IoT system of 800,000 battery-powered sensors faced challenges integrating software practices with embedded hardware. By building physical sensor farms, virtual emulators, and self-diagnosing firmware, the team learned to design for intermittent connectivity, power efficiency, and fleet-level observability. The project succeeded by treating the physical world, hardware constraints, and engineering environments as core parts of the system lifecycle.

DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read10 days ago

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03Martin Fowler · performance

Are Harnesses Worth the Cost?

An experiment was conducted to evaluate whether behavioral harnesses improve coding agent reliability when building a complex backend-for-frontend service. While frontier models succeeded consistently with or without a harness, the harness significantly increased token usage, time, and cost without improving final output. However, for a cost-optimized model, the harness improved success rates from 30 percent to 100 percent.

DEPTH ■■■■■17 min read12 days ago

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04GitLab · scaling

Make every AI credit count: See, cap, and reduce agent spend

Uncontrolled AI agent spending can be mitigated by combining open-weight models, centralized context graphs to reduce retries, and usage analytics with credit caps. GitLab introduced these capabilities in its Duo Agent Platform to help platform teams trace, limit, and optimize AI credit consumption. The resulting architecture matches specific tasks to lower-cost models while maintaining task completion quality.

DEPTH ■■■■■6 min read12 days ago

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05Tailscale · tutorial

It's time to make your own RSS reader

This post walks through the process of self-hosting a personal RSS reader using FreshRSS and Docker, secured privately over a Tailscale network. The author details the configuration of environment variables, auth keys, and Docker compose deployment to avoid exposing the service to the open web. The result is a private, algorithm-free news reader accessible across multiple devices and integrable with external reading apps or AI agents.

DEPTH ■■■■■10 min read9 days ago

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06Martin Fowler · practice

Fragments: October 21

This post discusses commentary on AI usage in writing, the cancellation of the Grace Hopper Celebration, and reviews a detailed article by Cindy Sridharan on debugging with AI agents. The reviewed article highlights that AI agents excel at processing raw data rather than reading code first, and outlines a three-step debugging process involving controls, signals, and hypothesis validation. The lesson is that engineers must guide AI agents by setting up verification loops and providing raw data rather than human-centric abstractions.

DEPTH ■■■■■5 min read4 days ago

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07Tailscale · architecture

Your agent, your network: How Meta’s Muse agent works with Tailscale

Meta integrated Tailscale into its Muse personal AI agent, allowing the agent to join a user's tailnet as a separate node and interact with self-hosted services and SSH sessions. By treating Muse like any standard tailnet node, users can apply Tailscale's access controls, grants, and tags to enforce security and adhere to the principle of least privilege.

DEPTH ■■■■■5 min read3 weeks ago

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08Martin Fowler · practice

Practitioner Voice: The Writing Category Nobody has Named Yet

The author explores a missing category of writing called Practitioner Voice, which is grounded in earned experience and visible personal judgment rather than academic rigor, corporate polish, or AI generation. They examine how AI can be used as an extended cognitive tool for practitioners without losing human accountability. Ultimately, the piece argues that maintaining personal judgment and consequence-bearing experience is essential for authentic professional writing.

DEPTH ■■■■■39 min read12 days ago

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09Martin Fowler · practice

Fragments: October 4

This post discusses the evolving role of software development and code in the era of large language models. It explores how shifting from deterministic building to inferential nurturing changes processes, why high-level representations remain critical for managing context windows, and how conceptual modeling becomes more important than the mechanical act of writing instructions.

DEPTH ■■■■■7 min read2 weeks ago

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10Martin Fowler · practice

Principles for effective slides

Presenters often rely on text-heavy slide decks that distract audiences and undermine storytelling. To fix this, speakers can use minimalist slides as a complementary visual channel to control the rate of information and manage cognitive load. This approach leads to more engaging presentations where visuals reinforce the spoken narrative rather than replace it.

DEPTH ■■■■■12 min read3 weeks ago

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