One trend this year may well be experimentation with agent orchestration and long-running agents – which is already underway. Also: Claude Code bans OpenCode while Codex embraces it, and more

A comprehensive guide to design system engineering (DSE): when it’s relevant, how AI changes things, and pointers for getting started. From Michael Abernethy, Principal Frontend Engineer at Rubrik

The “Ralph method” and running multiple agents at once gain popularity, AI job cuts at dev tooling and education providers, four nines of uptime after quitting the cloud, and more

No longer a hypothetical question, this is a mega-trend set to hit the tech industry

The most-read articles of the year, plus some personal favorites, and a look back at a busy year in tech

Also: GitHub upsets devs by charging for self-hosted CI/CD, Warsaw could become the EU’s new “tech capital”, hiring juniors is profitable now, and more

Bryan Cantrill explains how decades of server and cloud evolution shaped modern infrastructure and what today’s engineers should learn from it.

What happens when there’s a massive outage at AWS? A member of AWS’s Incident Response team lifts the lid, after playing a key role in resolving the leading cloud provider’s most recent major outage

Also: inadequate capacity planning at AWS, how the engineering team at Oxide uses LLMs, Linux now supports Rust in the kernel, and more

Exclusive excerpts from the newly-released book ‘Frictionless’, by Nicole Forsgren and Abi Noda.

How engineers and teams use MCP servers: from debugging to working with legacy systems, & giving non-devs more access. Details from 40+ devs – with some surprises