标签：#softwaredevelopment

The One TDD Habit That Saved My Sanity (and My Codebase) Quick context (why you're writing this) Here's the thing: I used to think I was doing TDD right. I’d write a test, watch it fail, then write just enough code to make it green. Rinse and repeat. Sounds textbook, right? But a few months ago I spent an entire afternoon chasing a bug that only showed up after I refactored a service class. The tests were all passing, yet the app was throwing NullReferenceExceptions in production. I was shocked. How could everything be green and still be broken? Turns out I was testing the inside of my code instead of what it actually did for the outside world. That realization hit me like a truck, and it completely changed how I approach TDD. The Insight Test behavior, not implementation. If your test is coupled to private fields, internal data structures, or the exact way a method accomplishes its goal, you’re not testing what matters—you’re testing how you happen to do it today. When you later refactor to improve performance, swap out a dependency, or even just rename a variable, those tests start failing for no good reason. You end up spending more time fixing tests than delivering value, and you lose confidence in the suite because it feels fragile. The payoff? A test suite that gives you confidence when you change code, not anxiety. You can refactor fearlessly because the tests only care about the contract: given these inputs, the system should produce these outputs or side‑effects . How (with code) Let’s look at a tiny but realistic example: a PasswordValidator service that checks whether a user‑chosen password meets our policy. ❌ The mistake: testing implementation details // PasswordValidator.cs public class PasswordValidator { private readonly IRegexProvider _regex ; // injected for testability public PasswordValidator ( IRegexProvider regex ) { _regex = regex ; } public bool IsValid ( string password ) { // implementation we might want to change later return _regex . IsMa

My Journey Towards AI and Software Development Hello everyone, My name is Kunal Tiwari, and I am a student who is passionate about technology, artificial intelligence, and software development. Technology has always fascinated me because it allows people to transform ideas into real-world solutions. Over time, I developed a strong interest in understanding how software is built and how AI can help solve everyday problems. I started exploring programming and software development with curiosity and a desire to learn. Although I am still at the beginning of my journey, I believe that consistent learning and practical projects are the best ways to grow as a developer. My current interests include: Artificial Intelligence (AI) Android App Development Software Engineering Problem Solving Building useful applications Through this blog, I plan to share my learning experiences, projects, challenges, and lessons that I discover along the way. My goal is not only to improve my technical skills but also to document my progress and connect with other learners and developers. I know the journey ahead will require patience, dedication, and continuous learning. However, I am excited about the opportunities that technology offers and look forward to building meaningful projects in the future. Thank you for reading my first post. I hope to share valuable insights and experiences as I continue my journey towards AI and software development. Best regards, Kunal Tiwari

Agentic AI in software development: what's actually production-ready in 2025 There's a lot of noise about AI agents right now. This post is an attempt to be precise: what is an agent architecturally, what can it actually do in a dev workflow today, and where does it still break. **What makes something an "agent" vs. a standard LLM call **A standard LLM call is stateless. You send a prompt, you get a response. No memory of previous turns (unless you manage it yourself), no external actions, no loop. An agent is a system built around an LLM that adds: Persistent memory across steps in a task Tool use - structured access to external systems (file I/O, shell execution, HTTP calls, database queries) A planning + evaluation loop - the agent generates a plan, executes a step, checks whether it succeeded, and decides next action Without all three, you don't have an agent. You have a capable model with maybe some extra context. What's actually production-ready today High confidence (use in production): Unit test generation for existing, well-documented code Boilerplate scaffolding (new modules, new endpoints, CRUD patterns) Documentation generation tied to code diffs Code migration tasks (framework upgrades, Python 2→3, ORMs) PR description generation from diffs Bug triage: given an issue, find likely affected files * Works but needs oversight: * Multi-file refactoring Dependency updates with breaking changes Writing integration tests (more surface area for wrong assumptions) Not there yet: Novel architecture decisions Debugging in unfamiliar/undocumented codebases Tasks with genuinely ambiguous requirements Long autonomous chains (>10 steps) without human checkpoints The failure modes to build around Ambiguous task specification Agents optimize for completing the task as specified. If the spec is loose, they'll complete the wrong task confidently. Be more precise with agents than you'd be with a junior engineer - there's no informal Slack thread to resolve ambiguity. Error

Let me tell you exactly what happened the first time I tried to set up Lambda manually. Four hours. IAM trust policies I didn't fully understand, ARNs copy-pasted into the wrong fields, an API Gateway that was technically configured but somehow not routing anything correctly, and a deploy that failed with an error message pointing me nowhere useful. I hadn't written a single line of actual business logic yet. That's when someone on my team mentioned the Serverless Framework. My first reaction was honestly skepticism — another abstraction layer sounded like another thing to learn and eventually fight with. I was wrong about that. This isn't a "look how clean this tool is" post. It's more like: here's what I actually did to get a Postgres-backed CRUD API running on Lambda, step by step, including the parts that tripped me up. What the Framework Is Actually Doing Under the Hood Worth knowing before you start: the Serverless Framework isn't magic. It's generating CloudFormation templates and submitting them to AWS on your behalf. Your Lambda functions, API Gateway routes, CloudWatch log groups — all of it gets provisioned from a single config file. It works with other providers too, but the AWS integration is where it really earns its keep. The console clicking and manual ARN-wiring that burns time at the start of every serverless project? Gone. Same deploy workflow whether you're building a REST API, an event processor, or a cron job. Once you've done it once, the second project takes a fraction of the time. What You're Building Four live endpoints backed by PostgreSQL. A Users table. Create, read, update, delete — nothing exotic, but a real enough foundation that you can extend it into something actual once this guide is done. You'll need an AWS account, the AWS CLI installed, and the Serverless Framework installed before starting. That's it. Step 1: Sort Out Your AWS Credentials Run this to create both config files in one go: bash cat << EOF > ~/.aws/credentials [def

Hiring an AI Development Company? Ask These 7 Questions First Most AI projects fail long before deployment. Not because the model is bad. Because teams skip the hard engineering questions. If you're evaluating an AI development company, ask these 7 questions first: 1. How is data secured? AI systems process sensitive business information. Ask: Where is data stored? Is encryption enabled at rest and in transit? Who has access to prompts, logs, and embeddings? Are enterprise security standards followed? Security should be designed in from day one. 2. What observability exists? You can't improve what you can't monitor. A production AI system should include: Request tracing Prompt/version tracking Latency monitoring Cost visibility Error reporting If nobody can explain what happened after a bad output — that's a problem. 3. How do you handle model drift? AI performance changes over time. Questions to ask: How are outputs evaluated? Is feedback collected? How are prompts/versioning managed? What happens when accuracy drops? Production systems need iteration loops. 4. What happens during failure? No system is perfect. Ask: Is there fallback logic? Human review? Retry handling? Graceful degradation? Failure handling matters more than demos. 5. How is access controlled? Enterprise AI systems require permissions. Examples: Role-based access API authentication Audit logs Team-level controls Not everyone should access everything. 6. What compliance assumptions exist? Especially important for regulated industries. Ask whether the system considers: GDPR SOC2 HIPAA Financial or internal compliance rules Compliance cannot be an afterthought. 7. Who owns the infrastructure? Clarify ownership before signing anything. Ask: Who owns the source code? Cloud infrastructure? Models and prompts? Data pipelines? You should avoid vendor lock-in. AI success is rarely about flashy demos. It's about secure infrastructure, reliability, observability, and long-term maintainability. What question

In 1994, Peter Deutsch published the Fallacies of Distributed Computing — eight assumptions that every developer building distributed systems makes, discovers are wrong, and pays for in production. The network is reliable. Latency is zero. Bandwidth is infinite. Each assumption sounds true. Each leads to system failures that could have been avoided. Thirty years later, we're making the same category of mistakes with generative AI. The trough of disillusionment for AI-assisted development has begun. Byron Cook, VP and Distinguished Scientist at Amazon, founder of AWS's Automated Reasoning Group (300+ scientists, 15+ teams), says it plainly: "Generative AI is sliding into the trough of disillusionment." The headlines are shifting. The "summer of vibe coding" is over. The disillusionment isn't caused by AI being useless. AI-assisted coding delivers real productivity gains. The disillusionment is caused by false assumptions about WHERE the gains come from and WHAT changes when generation gets fast. Teams expected 10x engineering. They got 10x code generation and 1x everything else. The gap between expectation and reality is the trough. This series names the eight assumptions, explains why each one fails, and presents the resolution — not from theory, but from domains that hit the same wall and climbed out. The Eight Fallacies 1. Faster code generation means faster engineering. You made one sub-system 10x faster. Seven others didn't change. The system doesn't get faster — it breaks at the interfaces. The CPU-memory wall tells you exactly what happens and what fixes it. 2. If the output looks correct, it is correct. AI-generated code is optimized for plausibility, not correctness. It compiles, passes tests, and reads well — while violating properties nobody tested. Plausible is not correct. The gap is where production failures live. 3. You can verify AI output with another AI. Guardrails, LLM-as-judge, AI code review — the verifier has the same failure modes as the thing

The conversation about cognitive debt in AI-assisted development has been framed as a tradeoff: you can go fast, or you can understand your system, but not both. The proposed mitigations — pair programming, code reviews, requiring a human to understand each change — are braking mechanisms. They trade speed for comprehension. TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) says braking is a compromise, not a resolution. A resolved contradiction eliminates the conflict. You don't choose between speed and understanding. You restructure the system so they don't conflict. There are six root causes of cognitive debt in AI-augmented development. Each one is a contradiction. Each one has a TRIZ resolution that doesn't involve slowing down. Root Cause 1: The Velocity-Comprehension Gap AI generates complex logic in seconds that would take a human hours to write. The human never spends the time typing the code during creation. The theory of the program is never fully formed. The Contradiction Technical contradiction: Improving development speed (AI generates code faster) worsens depth of understanding (human doesn't internalize the logic). Physical contradiction: The development process must be simultaneously FAST (to capture AI's productivity gains) and SLOW (to allow human assimilation of the system's behavior). Resolution: Separation in Space (Principle 2 — Extraction + Principle 1 — Segmentation) The contradiction assumes that the thing being understood IS the code. Extract the understanding target from the code and put it somewhere else — a smaller, slower-moving, human-readable artifact that captures what the code must satisfy, not how it works. Segment the system's theory into independent, composable units. Each unit is one property: "this service must never accept unauthenticated requests," "this data pipeline must preserve ordering," "this retry loop must terminate within 30 seconds." Each property is 1-3 sentences in natural language or 3-10 lines in a predicate language.

Over the weekend, I attended an event hosted by Cursor Kenya, bringing together developers, builders,...