Dennis Traub

Architecture in the Age of AI

[Dennis Traub @dtraub]

@Lockhead My answer was supposed to be a joke, but might be closer to reality than I think

[Dennis Traub @dtraub]

@Lockhead I work more, longer hours, context switching all the time. And even during the few off-hours, I keep constantly checking in with my agents to see if they need anything, are stuck, or can be sent off for the next few tasks. It's exhausting.

[Dennis Traub @dtraub]

AWS just added @OpenAI's GPT-5.6 to Bedrock - and with two lines of config, Codex CLI just picks it up.

I wrote up the setup, the API-key path, and a few gotchas: https://t.co/Q7keT724OD

[Dennis Traub @dtraub]

https://t.co/oPUnIElwmD

[Dennis Traub @dtraub]

Ever felt like your coding agent tends to add their own, often unhelpful interpretation of what the terms and concepts in your app mean?

AI coding agents amplify whatever you give them. If your vocabulary is ambiguous, they amplify ambiguity. If it's precise, they amplify precision.

Domain-Driven Design's Ubiquitous Language makes that amplification work for you, not against you:

https://t.co/sAI7gOc7DX

[Dennis Traub @dtraub]

Your agent keeps using that word, you don't think it means what the agent thinks it means...

How Domain-Driven Design and a Ubiquitous Language adds consistency to coding agent results.

https://t.co/eiSPOtV5S0

[Dennis Traub @dtraub]

Follow-up: if Bounded Contexts are where you draw the line, Ubiquitous Language is what you speak inside it. Wrote about how to make your coding agent use domain-specific vocabulary instead of generic "Customer" + CRUD:

https://t.co/eiSPOtV5S0

[Dennis Traub @dtraub]

Yesterday's post on applying Domain-Driven Design patterns to MCP server architecture has inspired some interesting discussions. If "separate AI tools by blast radius" makes intuitive sense to you, have a look at what DDD calls Bounded Contexts and Anti-Corruption Layers:

https://t.co/0V4tyICCgA

[Dennis Traub @dtraub]

An AI coding agent is the most confident Humpty Dumpty you'll ever work with. It will interpret your vocabulary however it sees fit, and it will never tell you it's confused.

Domain-Driven Design has a pattern for this. I wrote about how to apply it in practice:

https://t.co/sAI7gOcFtv

[Dennis Traub @dtraub]

AI isn't replacing junior devs. Your org chart does.

https://t.co/oPUnIElwmD

[Dennis Traub @dtraub]

@MarcJBrooker says junior developers have a structural advantage in the AI era. Mark Russinovich and @shanselman say AI imposes a "drag" on early-career developers that risks hollowing out the next generation.

Both are widely shared and treated as the definitive take, even though they appear to flatly disagree.

But what if they don't?

Brooker is describing what an individual junior can do. The person who arrives without calcified heuristics, who's comfortable expanding scope into business context and system ownership. That person will thrive.

Russinovich and Hanselman are describing what happens to the cohort. When companies stop hiring juniors, or pair them with AI agents instead of experienced engineers, the organizational pipeline dries out. The structure that develops judgment has been removed.

It's the same question - just different zoom levels.

Which makes the real decision not "will AI hurt or help juniors?" but "who is making that decision in your org, and is anyone doing it on purpose?"

Every company that chose not to open a junior headcount this quarter already made this decision. Every team that paired a senior with an AI coding agent instead of an early-career developer made it too.

I went deeper on the historical pattern (CNC manufacturing, Excel, and - strikingly similar to software engineering - law firms) and how we can make intentional decisions here:

https://t.co/HfEnlrXydc

[Dennis Traub @dtraub]

I went deeper on the argument, showing what Bounded Contexts and Anti-Corruption Layers look like applied to the MCP tool layer:

https://t.co/1bc6X7p4TE

[Dennis Traub @dtraub]

There's a thread on r/devops where an engineer says MCP servers "just showed up" in their infrastructure and they have no idea how to secure them. 76 upvotes, 39 comments. And if you read the solutions, they're all doing Domain-Driven Design without knowing it.

[Dennis Traub @dtraub]

MCP's protocol already enforces context boundaries by design. One client per server, no built-in cross-server communication. The architecture does this for us, we just have to lean into it instead of wrapping REST APIs one-to-one to build distributed monoliths all over again.

[Dennis Traub @dtraub]

I've been using Opus 4.7 for a couple days now and it's really great. But something's still missing: What if new models came with one particular skill, right out of the box?

Something like:
/adapt-harness-to-new-personality

Every new model comes with slightly - and sometimes vastly - different behaviors. Every time a new model comes out, all my evals break and my carefully curated, designed, and optimized skills and workflows need and update.

Hey @AnthropicAI, @OpenAI, @GoogleDeepMind, what do you think?

That's probably a really hard problem to solve, because there's no way to anticipate every use case. On the other hand, you've got the greatest minds on earth working for you.

Would that be something you could add? Maybe alongside you model cards? That would be really awesome!

[Johannes Koch @Lockhead]

Hey AWS community! 🎉

We're officially opening our Call for Speakers for AWS Community Day DACH 2026!

If you've been thinking "I should share what I've learned" - this is your moment. We want YOUR voice, YOUR experiences, YOUR lessons learned.

No AWS employees (sorry friends!) - this is pure community magic ✨

Topics we're excited about:
☁️ Cloud-Native Development
🤖 AI/ML
🚀 Serverless
🔒 Security
...and so much more!

Submit by June 30th: https://t.co/Mj05oawdaO

Let's make Berlin unforgettable together! 🇩🇪

#AWSCommunity #CloudComputing #TechConference #CallForSpeakers

[Dennis Traub @dtraub]

@iann0036 @awscloud You're absolutely right Ian, this shouldn't have happened. We are working with the health team to establish a mechanism so this doesn't happen again. My apologies to you and to every AWS customer.

Thank you for raising it!

[Dennis Traub @dtraub]

Now on the @aiDotEngineer Europe stage: @patrickdebois - of #DevOps fame - continuing his tradition of coining terms 🤩

#AIEEurope