[MM’s] Engineering Weekly #30 — When AI Starts Coding Itself
From agentic breakthroughs to cleaner documentation: how machines — and humans — are both learning to communicate better
🎯 Featured Article
🧠 Examples are the best documentation
Formal documentation often misses single, clear examples — leaving developers guessing. This article argues that concise, example-driven docs are the best way to teach complex systems effectively.
⬢ Shows why single examples often communicate more than abstract explanations.
⬢ Advocates for clarity and context in developer documentation over verbosity.
⏩ TL;DR (Quick Recap)
⬢ Example-based documentation improves understanding and onboarding.
⬢ AI coding agents now reason and automate debugging with minimal human input.
⬢ LLMs have preferences in data formats that affect token cost and accuracy.
⬢ JVM and Spring ecosystems are evolving with new releases and leadership shifts.
☕ JVM Corner
🧩 Why Most Java Developers Have No Idea How Garbage Collection Actually Works
A breakdown of Java’s misunderstood garbage collection and why “auto-optimization” is a myth.
⬢ Clarifies GC fundamentals and JVM memory management.
⬢ Emphasizes the need to tune and monitor GC for real-world performance.
🛠️ 7 Tools Every Java Developer Should Be Using (But Probably Isn’t)
A curated list of underused tools that improve productivity and debugging.
⬢ Highlights lightweight profilers, analyzers, and build-time helpers.
⬢ Encourages adoption of overlooked, high-impact developer tools.
🔠 Java Strings Internals
A technical deep dive into the evolution and design of Java Strings.
⬢ Explains immutability, memory optimizations, and security features.
⬢ Connects string internals to performance in concurrent applications.
🇹🇷 The Country That Broke Kotlin
A fascinating story of how a Turkish alphabet bug haunted the Kotlin compiler for years.
⬢ Reveals how language-specific quirks can expose deep compiler design issues.
⬢ Demonstrates the importance of global testing in language ecosystems.
📱 How I Simplified My Android App’s Data Layer with Room and Kotlin
A practical reflection on simplifying persistence in Android apps using Kotlin’s expressive syntax.
⬢ Shows how Room reduces boilerplate and improves safety.
⬢ Demonstrates the synergy between Kotlin idioms and Android architecture.
🍃 Spring Updates
🪶 Introducing Share Consumer Support (Kafka Queues) in Spring for Apache Kafka
Spring introduces Share Groups support for Kafka 4.0, enabling record-level parallelism.
⬢ Explains when to use Share Groups vs traditional consumer groups.
⬢ Details Spring Kafka 4.0’s preview implementation and use cases.
🌿 Spring Session MongoDB: Now Led by MongoDB Team
The MongoDB team officially takes over Spring Session MongoDB maintenance.
⬢ Provides new repository and Maven coordinates.
🌾 Spring Session Hazelcast: Now Led by Hazelcast Team
Hazelcast assumes leadership for its Spring Session integration.
⬢ Outlines migration details and support continuity.
🧩 Spring Framework 7.0.0-RC1 Available Now
Spring 7 embraces JDK 25, Jakarta EE 11, Kotlin 2.2, and GraalVM 25.
⬢ Aligns the framework with the latest Java ecosystem standards.
⬢ Prepares for the upcoming general availability milestone.
🔍 Extra Reads
AI & Agentic Systems
🤖 How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Trust AI Coding Agents — Claude solved a Terraform bug by reasoning through its own helper scripts.
🧩 Which Table Format Do LLMs Understand Best? (Results for 11 Formats) — Benchmarks across JSON, CSV, and YAML reveal surprising LLM comprehension trade-offs.
⚙️ Claude Sonnet 4.5 Tops SWE-Bench Verified, Extends Coding Focus Beyond 30 Hours — Anthropic’s new model shows multi-hour autonomous coding capability.
💡 Introducing Agent Skills — Claude gains modular skills for context-aware specialization.
🚀 Introducing Claude Haiku 4.5 — A smaller, faster model delivering near-Sonnet-level performance.
Software Design & Architecture
📦 Your Data Model Is Your Destiny — How sound abstractions turn features into long-term advantages.
🔗 On Dependencies in Objects — A clear guide to managing object collaboration and dependency injection patterns.
Security & Awareness
🕵️ How I Almost Got Hacked by a “Job Interview” — A firsthand account of a sophisticated developer-targeted phishing attack.
🧠 Why Your Boss Isn’t Worried About AI — Explains the cognitive gap between AI reliability and managerial perception.
Life & Thinking
🌍 Entropy: Why Life Always Seems to Get More Complicated — A reflection on entropy as a metaphor for personal and systemic complexity.
📵 Smartphones and Being Present — A concise essay on digital mindfulness and attention management.
🧑💻 Just Talk To It — The No-BS Way of Agentic Engineering — A firsthand look at a workflow where AI now writes nearly all production code.
Originally posted on marconak-matej.medium.com.