How to debug when you no longer understand the code

How to effectively debug when you no longer understand the code
about 1 hour by Cindy Sridharan

Debugging with AI agents works best when treated as a constraint satisfaction problem, not a code reading exercise. Collect hard facts first from logs, telemetry, DNS, kernel data, and packet captures, then use a control case to separate real signals from noise. Only then should an agent form hypotheses, and each one must satisfy every known fact or get discarded. Cindy argues that understanding systems matters more than understanding code, and that better tooling and processes will do more to improve agentic debugging than individual prompting skill.

Build a sustainable foundation with an AI Operating Layer
sponsored by Coder

AI has changed the rules of the industry, but without governance, it’s one unending headache. You need an environment that meets specific requirements for sustainable security. Check out Coder’s white paper “The AI Operating Layer” and learn how to build effective governance into your tech stack, with a clear checklist of requirements. Read more.

How did Apple Silicon get 50% faster in three years?
3 minutes by Daniel Lemire

Apple's M-series chips got about 50% faster on single-core tasks from 2022 to 2025, with multicore speed nearly doubling. Much of the gain comes from higher clock speeds, rising from 3.5 GHz to 4.6 GHz on performance cores, plus wider instruction decoding and more memory bandwidth. The new M6 adds two extra cores and more bandwidth, promising further gains.

The bedrock of software design
11 minutes by Alex Fedoseev

Algebraic data types let you encode domain rules directly into your types, so invalid states simply cannot exist. Sum types in particular force you to represent every possible outcome explicitly, whether that is success, failure, or absence of a value. Pattern matching then ensures you handle every case, and the compiler flags anything you miss. Together, they turn many runtime surprises into compile-time errors.

State of devs survey results 2026
4 minutes by Miranda Heath

Many developers are facing job insecurity, burnout, and uncertainty about their futures, with a quarter having been laid off at some point. AI is a major source of division, with nearly equal numbers feeling positive and negative about it, and many saying it harms their mental state and makes work less rewarding. Discrimination against women and pressure on LGBT+ and neurodivergent developers to hide their identities remain persistent problems.

How to achieve pruning when querying by non-partitioned columns
17 minutes by Haki Benita

Partition pruning normally only works when querying by the partition key, making that choice difficult. But if your data has predictable patterns, like sequential IDs that correlate strongly with time, you can add check constraints to communicate data ranges to the query planner. This lets the database skip irrelevant partitions even when filtering by non-key columns. For datasets with outliers, using multiple ranges in a single constraint keeps pruning effective without losing accuracy.

And the most popular article from the last issue was:

• How to read code