Tom Johnson
Software architect/educator; emphasizes architecture as a discipline and its role in business‑aligned engineering.
AI Agents Lack Human-Like Skepticism Toward Bad Metadata
Coding agents take bad metadata at face value. They won’t reconcile five different naming conventions for the same entity. They won’t flag that a span is suspiciously short because it timed out silently. This is a fundamental and under appreciated asymmetry: humans accumulate skepticism as a kind of professional immune system. AI agents don’t. They approach every dataset with the same clean-slate confidence.
AI Lacks Developer Intuition and “Sus” Detection
AI has no intuition for “that’s sus”. AI agents have none of that scar tissue that experienced developers accumulate over time.
Too Many False Alerts Kill Trust and Attention
The Law of False Alerts: “As the rate of erroneous alerts increases, operator reliance, or belief, in subsequent warnings decreases.” Too many alerts and people stop reading them. Too many false positives and people stop trusting them.
Observability Tools Built for Manual Coding Are Obsolete
Hot take for a room full of observability practitioners: Logs, traces, and metrics were designed for a world where humans wrote and reviewed every line of code. That world is gone. I'm speaking at the Observability Summit North America in Minneapolis on...
Debugging Wins With Session‑First Unified Timeline
System-first o11y has its function, but more and more devs are realizing that effective debugging requires a session-first approach with a single timeline that correlates: • User interactions • Console errors • Network req/res • Backend traces and spans
Half of Developers Skip Reviewing Untrusted AI Code
This chart should scare you👇. 96% of developers don't fully trust AI-generated code, yet only 48% always review it before it ships. Sit with that for a second.
Spec‑Driven Development Essential for Effective AI Tooling
If your team isn’t discussing Spec-Driven Development or how your design decisions are documented, versioned, and shared, you’re undermining your AI tooling strategy.
AI Makes System Design Impossible to Ignore for Engineers
Most engineers tune out when they hear “system design.” It feels like overhead. Until AI forces you to care about it.
AI Overlays Legacy Observability, Slowing Debugging Further
Adding AI to legacy observability practices won't make debugging faster. It'll just amplify the problem.
Why Connecting AI Everywhere Fails, Embrace Autonomous Agents
Built an MCP server recently? Did developers actually use it, or is it collecting dust? 😵 I'll be speaking at @theleaddev London (June 1-2) about why "connecting AI to everything" doesn't work and what actually does when building tools that...
AI Writes Code Faster than We Can Review
▶ Reading unfamiliar code is exhausting. Now imagine that code is coming from an LLM that writes faster than you can think and doesn't take lunch breaks ◀ This 👆 perfectly captures the AI productivity paradox: code is written faster than...