Software Engineering | Assah Bismark

Sep 1, 2026

The Chat App Is the Last Thing That Matters

Teams, Slack, Discord, a custom GUI. People keep asking where agents should live. The control plane is a different thing, and it isn't a surface.

People keep asking which chat app agents are going to win. Teams, Slack, Discord, or a custom GUI. A team moving to agents picks a surface before it has anything to put behind it. I think the question is backward. The chat app is just where the dispatch message lands, and agents stopped being chat a...More ›

Jun 1, 2026

A Sandbox Is Not an Agent Runtime

A sandbox gives an agent a machine. The runtime gives it identity, state, approvals, logs, and recovery.

Code is still one of the central assets of a company. AI agents don't make it cheap. They make it easier to produce more of it, which means they also make it easier to produce more mistakes, more migrations, more half-finished branches, and more changes that someone has to understand. That is why ar...More ›

May 14, 2026

Spikes Are for Technical Bets

Storage needed numbers. The reviewer needed a phase constraint.

Spikes are for technical bets. Snif had two architecture questions before the main implementation: where repository context should live, and how the reviewer should run. Snif is an AI code review tool. It analyzes a pull request, retrieves the relevant context from the repository, and runs a structu...More ›

Apr 22, 2026

When to Build Big

The question isn't whether to start small or build big. The question is what you're uncertain about.

The question isn't whether to start small or build big. The question is what you're uncertain about. If you're uncertain about what users want, or whether the problem is worth solving, or which approach will work, you start small. Ship something ugly. Get it in front of users. You can't hide behind ...More ›

Apr 12, 2026

Stabilize Claude Code for Open-Weight Models

A three-layer proxy stack to keep Claude Code stable when routing through LiteLLM to open-weight models.

Running Claude Code with open-weight models like DeepSeek or Qwen through a LiteLLM proxy works. Until it doesn't. The port changes every time LiteLLM restarts because it picks a random dynamic port. The request payload grows until backends reject it with 400 errors. Usage stats come back null and t...More ›

Mar 17, 2026

More Agents Is Not All You Need

A Google Research paper tested 180 agent configurations and found multi-agent systems average -3.5% performance. I tested it on code generation and got a different result.

Everyone building AI agent systems right now assumes the same thing: more agents, better results. Split the work across specialized agents, let them collaborate, and the output improves. A research paper from Google Research, DeepMind, and MIT tested that assumption across 180 controlled configurati...More ›

Mar 10, 2026

Architecture Is the New Product

AI writes the code now. The architecture is what actually ships.

What do software teams actually produce? Most people say features. Ship features, hit deadlines, move the roadmap. For a long time that was close enough. But now AI can generate features. It can scaffold services, write CRUD endpoints, wire up frontends, produce tests. The code itself is approaching...More ›

Mar 4, 2026

Taste, Judgment, and the Thing AI Cannot Do

AI handles the logic. But logic was never the hard part.

AI has been around since the very beginning of computers. This is not some new phenomenon. Computing has steadily evolved from binary code and assembly language to the high-level languages we use today, all of it trying to bridge the gap between what a human wants and what a machine can execute. Pre...More ›

Mar 4, 2026

There Is No AI Thinking (And You Can't Outsource It)

The machines got faster. The real question is whether we got lazier.

There Is No AI Thinking (And You Can't Outsource It) We have officially entered the era of Inference-at-Scale. The marketing hype surrounding "Artificial Intelligence" has never been louder, bolstered by the deployment of NVIDIA's Rubin) architecture and the rise of Agentic Ecosystems. These systems...More ›

Jan 21, 2026

The Infinite Software Crisis

What Happens When AI Writes Faster Than We Can Think

The Infinite Software Crisis: What Happens When AI Writes Faster Than We Can Think There's been a lot of talk lately about what's being called the "Infinite Software Crisis". It's not a new observation - people have been warning about this for a while - but it's been circulating more in engineering ...More ›

Dec 16, 2025

Streams, Parallelism, and the Quest for Speed

A pragmatic exploration of Java streams and parallelism.

I've always been fascinated by the relentless pursuit of performance in software. It's a game of optimization, a constant dance between elegance and efficiency. Lately, I've been diving deep into two concepts that feel like they're at the heart of this pursuit: streams and parallelism. They're not n...More ›

Jan 7, 2023

Rust concurrency with Mandelbrot Set

Exploring concurrency in Rust programming.

Rust excels in concurrent programming by enforcing rules that prevent memory errors and data races. For example: - Mutexes: Rust ensures you only access shared data when holding the lock and releases it automatically. In C/C++, this relationship is often left to comments. - Read-Only Data: Rust prev...More ›