Writing by Matt Collins in Software Development, collected in chronological order.
It is now clear: AI is transforming how software is developed. Anyone leading software development teams needs to be keeping a close eye on this to understand the tools’ rapidly evolving capabilities as well as their limitations and risks. Here’s a snapshot (as of January 2025) of how I think AI tools currently fit into […]
I heard about FastHTML a few months back and was immediately intrigued by its pitch: “Modern web applications in pure Python Built on solid web foundations, not the latest fads – with FastHTML you can get started on anything from simple dashboards to scalable web applications in minutes.” https://www.fastht.ml/ This sounded like something I could […]
Lots of people are starting to explore what can be done with agent-based AI systems. It feels like there’s huge potential in them. But getting an agentic system to work reliably enough to use in practice often turns out to be very hard. Here are a few techniques that can help with reliability. Technique 1: […]
[Edit: I wrote this a while ago and I’d now recommend you look at the idea of ‘evals’ as a way to approach this.] A challenge when developing software that makes use of large language models is writing automated tests for it. With traditional software, you tend to know exactly what output you expect to […]