Marc Brooker's Blog

Aurora DSQL: Scalable, Multi-Region OLTP A paper! Our new paper, Aurora DSQL: Scalable, Multi-Region OLTP, is now available on Arxiv. I’m excited about this one: it’s a fully end-to-end look at how Aurora DSQL works, from query processing, to transactions, to replication, to the control plane. We’ve shared most of this content before in other forms, on this blog, on Marc Bowes’ Blog, Werner’s Blog, in talks, and on the AWS blog. But this version covers all the ground, all in one place. You…

Meet Alice. Alice is impatient. What do you mean? Meet Alice. Alice uses your web service. Alice, like most humans, measures her time in seconds and minutes. Alice says your service is slow. You tell Alice that the mean request to your service completes in 100ms, but Alice says that her mean wait time is 1s. You’re both right. Meet Alex. Alex uses your web service. Alex, like most humans, measures his time in seconds and minutes. Alex says that when you have outages, they last a long time and…

Is this blog written by AI? No. None of the human-readable text on this blog is written by AI, and I have no plans to change that. The weird grammar, incorrect assumptions, spelling errors, and annoying tics are all mine. Including the em dashes. I don’t use LLMs for writing. On this blog, or in my professional life. I use agents extensively for brainstorming, research, summarizing, checking facts, handling markup, finding references, analyzing data, and so on. But I think that asking people to…

Agentic software development hypothesis This is the quality content you come here for, right? Agentic Software Development Hypothesis: Weak form: Any coding task for which a complete specification is available will become trivial. Strong form: Any coding task for which a deterministic oracle is available will become trivial. First objection: Few meaningful tasks have a complete specification. Second objection: Most oracles aren’t deterministic. Strongest form: Any coding task for which a…

What’s Easy Now? What’s Hard Now? This is the fourth in a series about how AI is changing software development, after It’s time to be right., What about juniors?, and My heuristics are wrong. What now?. It stands alone, but if you found this interesting you may also find those interesting. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the shape of the capabilities of coding agents. What they’re good at now, what they’re going to be good at. What they’re bad at now, how much of that is…

It’s time to be right. Outcomes continue to matter. Earlier this week, I spoke at AI Dev 26. This is what I spoke about there. I’ve been making money, in some form, building software for nearly 30 years. The last five months have been the most exciting of that entire time. I’m extremely optimistic about the future of software, and the future of software engineering as a field. But I have a hypothesis about agentic AI for development, and for knowledge work broadly: in future, the size of the…

Spec Driven Development isn’t Waterfall Write down what you mean. After spending a few months writing (e.g. on the Kiro Blog), and speaking (e.g. Real Python Podcast, SE Radio) about spec-driven development, I’ve noticed a common misconception: spec driven development is a return to a waterfall style of software development. Specification driven development (in Kiro, for example) isn’t about pulling designs up-front, it’s about pulling designs up. Making specifications explicit, versioned,...

What about juniors? Start at the beginning. Last week I wrote about how the role of the most senior tech ICs has changed. Today, I wanted to share some thoughts on a more difficult topic: how the role of junior software engineers, folks just starting out on their career, has changed or will change. First, the good news. In last week’s post, I wrote this about senior folks: It’s hard to admit where you’re wrong. It’s hard to go back to being a beginner. Junior engineers don’t have thi...

My heuristics are wrong. What now? More words. More meaning? Some people who ask me for advice at get a lot of words in reply. Sometimes, those responses aren’t specific to my particular workplace, and so I share them here. In the past, I’ve written about echo chambers, writing, writing for an audience, time management, and getting big things done. Do you remember Cool Runnings? In the movie, John Candy is a retired bobsled champion, who uses his experience, connections, and lovable curmud...

Music To Build Agents By I don't have this problem, because I don't use a mouse. Press play, then start reading: Want to learn how to think about agent policy? Start with Goethe’s Der Zauberlehrling. So come along, you old broomstick! Dress yourself in rotten rags! You’ve long been a servant; Obey my orders now! When I talk to customers and teams around me about agents and agent policy, and the work we’re doing on AgentCore Policy (now GA) and Strands Steering, I hear a lot of folk...