Building resilient AI-powered software, and planning for when things go wrong

Last week’s guest on the podcast was Sam Newman, who had released a book I’ve personally long awaited titled Building Resilient Distributed Systems. It’s an especially timely book for many of us software engineers, as we’re seeing more outages with nearly all services and systems – much of it caused by more code deploys thanks to AI agents writing more code; and more bugs causing more incidents in production.

Sam’s new book, Building Resilient Distributed Systems, in print form

Sam’s book being “fresh out of the oven,” it naturally also touches on what AI changes as we design resilient systems. In fact, Sam told me that he took a total of three years to finishe the book – instead of the two he originally planned – because he went back and reworked all parts of the book, updating parts where AI is relevant to talk about.