The Software Architects' Newsletter June 2025

The Software Architects' Newsletter
June 2025
View in browser

Welcome to the InfoQ Software Architects' Newsletter! We bring you essential news and experience on emerging patterns and technologies from industry peers each month.

This month, we again focus on "AI Trends: Disrupting Software Tooling, Techniques, and Teams". Technologies, patterns, and practices from this topic span the entire "diffusion of innovation" graphs in our InfoQ Trends Reports 2024 eMag and our InfoQ AI, ML and Data Engineering Trends Report - September 2024 (and accompanying podcast).

There's no denying that LLMs have dominated the conversation around software engineering for the past year, but at InfoQ, we focus on the impact this focus is having within the enterprise and on real-world software delivery projects.

News

Using AI Code Generation to Migrate Twenty Thousand Tests

In a recent Engineering Culture by InfoQ podcast, Shane Hastie spoke to Sergii Gorbachov, a staff engineer at Slack, about how they successfully used AI combined with traditional coding approaches to migrate twenty thousand tests in ten months. They discovered that AI alone was insufficient and required human oversight and conventional tools to work effectively.

HTAP: The Rise and Fall of Unified Database Systems?

The recent article by Zhou Sun, "HTAP is Dead", sparked a debate in the data community about the future of hybrid transaction/analytical processing (HTAP). HTAP was meant to help integrate historical and online data at scale, supporting more flexible query methods and reducing business complexity.

In the article, Sun, co-founder and CEO at Mooncake Labs, argues that the long-promised vision of unifying transactional and analytical workloads in a single system has failed to materialize. Gartner introduced the term HTAP over a decade ago, announcing it as "the next big DB architecture", where the goal was to close the gap between operational and analytical systems.

Opera Neon and Orca: AI Agents and the Web

Opera has introduced Opera Neon, a new browser that goes beyond traditional web navigation by integrating AI agents capable of interpreting user intent, performing tasks, and supporting creative workflows. The launch reflects a move toward what Opera describes as "agentic browsing", where the browser takes an active role in helping users accomplish goals, such as automating tasks or generating content, rather than simply displaying websites.

Related, researchers at UC San Diego have released Orca, an open-source system that demonstrates how large language models (LLMs) can assist users on the web, not by taking control, but by guiding interaction. In the peer-reviewed white paper, the research team was able to demonstrate a significant improvement in task speed and accuracy during evaluation, offering early evidence of the potential of human-in-the-loop agents in real-world workflows.

Introducing ANS: DNS-Inspired Secure Discovery for AI Agents

The Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) has recently introduced a new standard for securely discovering AI agents. Inspired by DNS, the Agent Name Service (ANS) provides a protocol-agnostic registry mechanism that uses Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) to establish agent identity and trust.

OpenAI Launches o3-pro Model Focused on Reliability, Amid Mixed User Feedback

OpenAI launched o3-pro, a new version of its most advanced model aimed at delivering more reliable, thoughtful responses across complex tasks. Now available to Pro and Team users in ChatGPT and via API, o3-pro replaces the earlier o1-pro.

Based on the o3 architecture, o3-pro maintains access to tools like Python, file analysis, web browsing, and image interpretation, allowing it to tackle multifaceted problems. The model is designed for users who prioritize correctness and depth over speed. OpenAI cautions that o3-pro responses may take longer to generate than those from lighter models.

Case Study

AI Interventions to Reduce Cycle Time in Legacy Modernization

In No Silver Bullet, Fred Brooks argues that achieving an order of magnitude gain in software development productivity will only occur if the essential complexity of software engineering is addressed. For Brooks, the essential complexity of software engineering is conceptualizing software's "interlocking pieces". This is in contrast to the relatively trivial task of representing the chosen concept in an implementation.

Today's widely adopted AI-enabled tools for software development, like Copilot, aider, and cline, readily produce representations when given a natural language description of a concept. However, if Brooks was correct, these tools address only the accidental complexity of software engineering, not the essential complexity of "specifying, designing, and testing [the conceptual construct]".

In the full version of this article, the authors share their experiences and insights on how LLMs helped them uncover and enhance the conceptual constructs behind software. They discuss how these approaches address the inherent complexity of software engineering and improve the likelihood of success in large, complex software modernization projects.

The authors state that combining rigorous, systematic approaches like static analysis with AI summarization allows for new, customized approaches to modernization. The ability to automate and inspect the outputs of static analysis helps human experts perform their jobs with confidence, while LLM summarization significantly reduces the toil of preparing lengthy documentation.

These advantages bring collaborators from different backgrounds into the process of modernizing software. Only after software teams understand the concepts behind legacy software can they effectively rewrite it, with or without AI tools.

This content is an excerpt from a recent InfoQ article by Michael Wytock, Ken Judy, and Aaron Foster Breilyn, "AI Interventions to Reduce Cycle Time in Legacy Modernization".

To get notifications when InfoQ publishes content on these topics, follow "AI, ML & Data Engineering", "Machine Learning", and "Large Language Models (LLMs)" on InfoQ.

Missed a newsletter? You can find all of the previous issues on InfoQ.

Sponsored

Upcoming Events

InfoQ and QCon: For practitioners, by practitioners

InfoQ Dev Summit Munich 2025 (October 15–16): Master modern software development.

In a landscape of rapid AI advancements and increasing system complexity, senior developers need practical strategies. Join your peers in Munich for two days of deep dives into scalable architectures, resilient systems, and effective platform engineering. Learn from practitioners on the front lines, without the marketing fluff. See the full schedule and register today.

QCon San Francisco 2025 (November 17–21): Lead the future of software.

As AI continues to reshape the development lifecycle and distributed systems grow more intricate, staying ahead is critical. QCon San Francisco offers 12 curated tracks and over 60 practitioner-led sessions designed for senior software engineers and architects. Gain actionable insights into scaling your systems, optimizing your architecture, and making impactful technical decisions. Explore the tracks and secure your spot.

QCon AI New York 2025 (December 16–17): Accelerate the entire software lifecycle with AI.

Move your AI initiatives from experimental to essential. This practitioner-driven conference is for engineering leaders, architects, and senior developers focused on the practical application of AI in the software development lifecycle. Learn from those who are successfully building, deploying, and scaling reliable and secure AI systems in enterprise environments. Register now to lead your team’s AI journey.

About InfoQ

Senior software developers rely on the InfoQ community to keep ahead of the adoption curve. One of the main reasons software architects and engineers tell us they keep coming back to InfoQ is because they trust the information provided and selected by their peers.

We’ve been helping software development teams adopt new technologies and practices for over 19 years through InfoQ articles, news items, podcasts, tech talks, trends reports, and QCon software development conferences.

We hope you find this newsletter useful. If not, you can unsubscribe using the link below.

Forwarded email? Subscribe and get your own copy.

Follow InfoQ on:

If you are based in the European Economic Area (EEA), please contact us so we can provide you with the protections afforded to you under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
You have received this email because you subscribed to "The Architects' Newsletter". To stop receiving the Architects' Newsletter, please click the following link: Unsubscribe

- - -

C4Media Inc. (InfoQ.com), 705-2267 Lake Shore Blvd. West,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M8V 3X2