intelligent Engineering: Principles for Building With AI

Software engineering is changing — again. Not in a loud, overnight way, but in a quiet structural way that’s already reshaping how good teams build software.

We aren’t replacing engineers. We are upgrading the way engineers think, work, and build.

AI isn’t a shortcut to avoid the hard parts — it simply shifts where the hard parts are.

Over 2 years applying AI in prototyping, experimentation, internal tools, production systems, and team workflows — one thing has become very clear:

AI doesn’t make engineering easier. It makes disciplined engineering more valuable.

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Level Up Code Quality with an AI Assistant

Using AI coding assistants to introduce, automate, and evolve quality checks in your project.

I have talked about teams needing to have a world class developer experience as a pre-requisite for a well functioning team. When teams lack such a setup, the most common response is a lack of time or buy in from stakeholders to build these things. With AI coding assistants being readily available to most developers today, the engineering effort and the cost investment for the business lesser reducing the barrier to entry.

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How to choose your coding assistants

Why it’s harder for a professional developer to use a tool despite the wide variety of choices

Coding assistants like Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Codex, Aider, OpenCode, JetBrains AI etc. have been making the news for the last few months. Yet, the choice of tools is a lot harder and limited for some of us than it seems.

TL;DR: OpenCode > Claude Code > Aider > Copilot > *

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Patterns for AI assisted software development

Moving beyond tools: habits, prompts, and patterns for working well with AI

In the last post — AI for Software Engineering, not (only) Code Generation — we explored how AI is transforming software engineering beyond just writing code. Now, let’s look at what that means for teams and individuals in practice.

There are a few patterns that people running teams and on teams that are going to build software with assistance from AI tools should remember.

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AI for Software Engineering, not (only) Code Generation

Rethinking the role of AI across the entire software lifecycle

Everyone has been talking about using coding assistants to aid with software delivery. There is more to delivering good software than writing code.

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What makes Developer Experience World-Class?

The habits, tools, and practices that set great engineering teams apart.

Developer experience (DevEx) isn’t just about fancy tools or slick UIs - it’s about removing friction so teams can move with confidence, speed, and clarity. In high-performing teams, great DevEx means fewer context switches, faster feedback loops, and more time spent actually building. In this post, we’ll explore the five non-negotiables every codebase should have to support world-class collaboration, and we’ll map out a practical DevEx stack to help your team deliver better products, faster.

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What are event driven architectures?

A couple of years ago, I was part of group of individuals working on defining different Event Driven architectures during a weekend summit. A summary of the summit was already published by Martin Fowler as first as a blog and later as a talk, the blog takes a slightly different view than the explanation I needed and thus this post was created. This is a recreation of the contents in the talk. If you have watched it, you can skip reading this summary.

What is event driven?

This technique is a popular technique to avoid coupling in

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MLOps: Building a healthy data platform

Spoiler: MLOps is to ML Platforms what DevOps is to most tech products. If you think this means MLOps is automating your deployments, this article is for you.

What is DevOps and how is it so much bigger than automating deployments?

You know that a term you coined has made it mainstream when people use it regularly in conversations and rarely understand what you meant.

 — Martin Fowler (paraphrased from an in-person conversation)

Rouan summarises DevOps culture well in Read on →

Data storage patterns, versioning and partitions

When you have large volumes of data, storing it logically helps users discover information and makes understanding the information easier. In this post, we talk about some of the techniques we use to do so in our application.

In this post, we are going to use the terminology of AWS S3 buckets to store information. The same techniques can be applied on other cloud, non cloud providers and bare metal servers. Most setups will include a high bandwidth low latency network attached storage with proximity to the processing cluster or disks on HDFS if the entire platform uses HDFS. Your

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Version controlled configuration and secrets management for Terraform

Terraform is a tool to build your infrastructure as code. We’ve been having a few challenges while trying to figure out how to how to manage configuration and secrets when integrating terraform with our CD pipeline.

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