BenRCongdon

TL;DR: "Private by obscurity" has been dissolved. Internal tools often have layering boundaries that are enforced only by convention. It's natural to assume a "high trust environment", where privileged actions are discouraged by obscurity and goodwill ins

The rise of coding agents has made it easy for a single engineer to spend thousands of dollars a day in LLM tokens. This is a new class of expense, and it will change the future cost structure of software engineering. We are between stable equilibria toda

Coding agents and reasoning models let individuals consume many more LLM tokens than they could a year ago. It's now easy for a single engineer to spend thousands of dollars in daily token usage. This is being actively encouraged through the recent memeti

In late January, I published a post 1 ( archive ) on the Databricks engineering blog about "SAFE", the feature flagging and experimentation platform I've been working on for the past few years. SAFE is what I've been spending most of my time on during my

Previously: 2024 , 2023 , 2022 , 2021 , 2020 , 2019 , 2018 , a href="https://benjamincongdon.me/blog/2017/12/31/...

A few days ago I tumbled down some stairs and managed to bruise both of my knees. I've taken a break from running since then to prevent injuring myself further. It's made me reflect on an injury earlier this summer where I aggravated my knee through overt

Over the holidays, I've been thinking about what the impacts of 2025's progress in AI coding tools will mean for how software gets designed, built, and operated in 2026. The primary impact of LLM tooling, so far, is that the marginal cost (both in terms o

I'm about half a dozen flights into training for a Private Pilot's License and wanted to write some notes while I'm still firmly in the "beginner mindset". Flight training has tons and tons of mnemonics . Wikipedia has 2 separate articles for these ( 1 ,

David Chalmers recently wrote a thought-provoking paper on the nature of conversational LLM entities, titled "What We Talk to When We Talk to Language Models" . It introduces some useful conceptual handles around the problem of LLM ontology, but I think i

Previous book lists: 2022 , 2021 , 2020 , 2019 , 2018 . Additionally, my a hr...