Addy Osmani is an engineering and evangelism leader who spent over 14 years at Google leading developer experience across Chrome and, in recent years, AI (Gemini, coding agents, and agentic engineering), most recently as a Director at Google Cloud AI. https://addyosmani.com A software factory is harnessing loops at scale - the system that builds your software instead of you. You can run the loop with humans in it (light factory) or you can ignore the humans (dark factory) and let those agents scope, build and ship code, without anyone really reading the details. But if people stop reading, they'll stop understanding your software. Your hardest job now is knowing which checks to build and how much autonomy to delegate. Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/software-factories/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/software-factories/ Engineers need to own the outer loop, the accountability for these systems. A written version of my AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 closing keynote: quality, verdict, and answerability, the three hidden costs of delegation, and building software factories you can stand behind. Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/own-the-outer-loop/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/own-the-outer-loop/ Taste used to be a byproduct of the reps. Agents took the reps. So if you're junior you now have to go get the taste and judgment on purpose. A builder's look at the weakening entry level, the two debts we now owe, and concrete ways to build judgment when the machine writes the code. Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/earning-judgment/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/earning-judgment/ AI gets good at anything with an answer key. Your career is everything that doesn't have one. Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/career-advice-age-of-agents/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/career-advice-age-of-agents/ The action in agentic engineering has moved from prompting to operating. Autonomy isn't one ladder, it's two axes (agency and orchestration) and six levels you move between per task. The real question is what level a task deserves, and what verification makes that level defensible. Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/agentic-autonomy-levels/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/agentic-autonomy-levels/ I co-wrote a Google whitepaper about how AI is changing the software lifecycle. I'm not going to summarize the whole thing. Instead, here are the handful of ideas in it I think actually matter, plus six figures you're welcome to reuse. Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/new-sdlc-vibe-coding/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/new-sdlc-vibe-coding/ Coding agents are extraordinarily good now, and getting better fast. The interesting consequence is that the hard part of engineering moved from writing code to deciding whether to trust it, which makes review the most leveraged skill in software right now. How you approach it depends enormously on who you are: a solo developer with no users and a team maintaining a ten-year-old application are not solving the same problem. Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/agentic-code-review/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/agentic-code-review/ You don't really need to be good at prompting anymore. The thing to get good at is the loop that does the prompting for you. It's five building blocks plus somewhere to keep notes, and Codex and Claude Code both have all five now. Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/loop-engineering/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/loop-engineering/ Technical debt lives in your code. Cognitive debt lives in your head. Intent debt lives in the artifacts you may have never wrote: the goals, constraints, and rationale for why the system is the way it is. If you're lucky, some of this exists scattered in team documents or discussions, but it's likely incomplete. It's the one kind of debt your agents can't pay down for you, and agentic engineering makes it the most expensive. Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/intent-debt/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/intent-debt/ Starting more agents is easy now. However, more agents running doesn't mean more of you available - your cognitive bandwidth doesn't parallelize. All the judgement to actually steer them and merge the code they write into the codebase still has to route through exactly one serial processor which is just you. Orchestration tax is basically the price you pay for forgetting this and the only real fix is to start architecting your own attention like you architect any concurrent system. Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://addyosmani.com/blog/orchestration-tax/ https://addyosmani.com/blog/orchestration-tax/