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Featured image for Cuttlesoft's "What GPT-5.5 Actually Changes for Custom Software Builds" post showing a clean horizontal bar chart on a dark midnight-zone background that benchmarks OpenAI's GPT-5.5 agentic coding performance, with a small monospace header reading "GPT-5.5 / Agentic Coding Benchmarks," a seafoam-green gradient bar reaching 82.7% on Terminal-Bench 2.0 to represent state-of-the-art accuracy on complex multi-step command-line workflows requiring planning and tool coordination, and a pacific-blue gradient bar reaching 58.6% on SWE-Bench Pro to represent end-to-end resolution of real-world GitHub issues, with both bars falling visibly short of a sand-colored dashed vertical threshold line at 95% labeled "where you can stop reviewing," visually arguing that GPT-5.5's agentic coding numbers are the most impressive any frontier LLM has produced yet still well below the autonomy threshold where engineering teams could safely skip human code review on production custom software builds.
May 7, 2026 • Frank Valcarcel

GPT-5.5 Is Here. Should You Pause Your Software Project?

Within days of the release, three clients asked the same question: should we pause the project and rebuild around this? The answer is almost never. Here is why.

Featured image for Cuttlesoft's "Agent Sprawl Is the New Shadow IT" post showing a six-by-three grid of eighteen circular agent icons centered against a dark midnight-zone background, with three icons highlighted in seafoam and surrounded by soft halos and tracker rings to represent the AI agents enterprise IT and security teams actually monitor, and fifteen dim outlined icons representing the unmonitored agents employees have installed across coding assistants, MCP servers, browser extensions, and SaaS tools, with a faint scatter of even smaller noise dots fading into the dark at the edges of the frame to suggest the larger uninventoried fleet beyond, visually arguing that AI agent sprawl has become the new shadow IT problem for governance, supply chain security, and budget accountability in 2026.
May 5, 2026 • Frank Valcarcel

Agent Sprawl Is the New Shadow IT

An engineer wires up a Claude Code workflow on Monday. A product manager installs a Notion agent on Tuesday. By Friday there are six new identities operating against company data with no clear owner.

Low-poly geometric iceberg illustration in seafoam teal against a midnight zone navy night sky scattered with stars, with the small crystalline peak above the waterline and a much larger faceted mass extending deep below the surface — a visual metaphor for the gap between the $70/month sticker price of AI coding tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code and the $1,000+ per-developer monthly cost that heavy agentic AI usage actually drives in 2026.
May 1, 2026 • Frank Valcarcel

What AI Costs Your Development Partner

Anyone offering a firm discount on a software project based on AI productivity gains is making a bet, not a measurement. Here is what AI actually costs the teams building your software

A single broken link in a steel chain, representing the trust chain vulnerabilities exploited in recent open source supply chain attacks
April 27, 2026 • Frank Valcarcel

Four Supply Chain Attacks in Three Weeks Is Not a Coincidence

Four supply chain attacks on widely used open source packages and a breach at one of the largest frontend platforms. Five incidents in three weeks. The pattern is accelerating.

The iron triangle of project management showing scope, time, and budget as three connected constraints with the rule: lock two, flex one
April 17, 2026 • Frank Valcarcel

The Iron Triangle: A Practical Guide for Project Management

You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant. Warren Buffett was talking about investing, but it is one of the clearest descriptions of custom software development we have ever read.

Three representations of an agent loop stacked vertically, progressing from a solid circle to a segmented circle to a node-and-edge graph, illustrating the spectrum from implicit to fully explicit control flow
April 14, 2026 • Frank Valcarcel

The Agent Loop: One Pattern, Three Frameworks

Every agent framework runs the same loop: call the LLM, execute tools, repeat until done. Here is what that looks like across three frameworks, and what breaks when you scale it.

Age gate modal dialog with shield and lock icon on a dark background asking users to verify their date of birth before accessing an application, surrounded by abstract security symbols including shield outlines, lock icons, and geometric accents, illustrating age verification requirements for mobile app distribution and regulatory compliance.
March 19, 2026 • Frank Valcarcel

Age Verification Is Coming to the Software Stack

Age verification has moved from niche policy to operational reality. With App Store Accountability Acts taking effect in 2026, every app developer is in scope. Here is what you need to know.

Two nearly identical SaaS dashboards side by side showing the same metrics and chart data, illustrating how quickly a competitor can clone a product's core functionality
March 17, 2026 • Frank Valcarcel

Product Strategy Is the New Moat in SaaS

How long would it take a competitor to rebuild your product? The clone window has collapsed, and the SaaS companies that survive will be the ones that know what to build, not just how to build it.

Two women reviewing a software development contract together at a table
March 11, 2026 • Frank Valcarcel

The Costs Your Software Contract is Leaving Out

Most dev shop proposals are thorough about the build and silent about what comes after. Here is what ownership actually costs and the questions to ask before you sign.

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Regulatory Agility

Compliance doesn't have to be a scary word. Learn how our experts manage regulations like HIPAA and GDPR.

Data Privacy in Django: Frank at Djangocon 2018
November 9, 2018

Data Privacy in Django: Frank at Djangocon 2018

Frank presents at Djangocon in San Diego. His talk, on pseudonymization. was titled "Pseu, Pseu, Pseudio. Pseudonymization in Django".
Data Pseudonymization in Django
September 13, 2018

Data Pseudonymization in Django

This post outlines a few different ways to achieve data pseudonymization for user privacy, security, and compliance with regulations like GDPR using the Django framework.

On Software Development

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This Week I Learned, or TWIL for short is our team's weekly review of continuous learning, tips, tricks, and other musings from the world of software development.

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