The MissionWe recently partnered with a startup that had developed a clinically proven approach to alleviating neuroplastic chronic pain. Their program worked: a coach-led model that helped patients ease chronic pain at a lower cost than conventional treatment. The problem was reach. The in-person model could not scale to the demand they were seeing, and there were not enough coaches to close the gap. We were brought in to build a digital platform that could deliver the program to every patient who needed it.Our Development Philosophy and InspirationAt 8th Light, we approach agentic…
8th Light's Head of Agentic AI, Travis Frisinger, and I spent two days in San Francisco at LangChain Interrupt 2026 watching what happens when agent demos meet production traffic. The room was full of companies that have crossed that line, and a few that wish they hadn't tried.The conversation a year ago was "can agents work?" The conversation in May was "how do we operate reliable, observable, governable agent systems at scale?" In the discussions we had at the conference, we validated that the shift was real and not just product marketing.What follows is what stood out across the two days,…
Why This Matters in the Era of Agentic EverythingThe gap between a Jira ticket and the first pull request (PR) is often a graveyard of productivity. Context switching, boilerplate setup, and requirement analysis can eat up hours of a senior engineer's day before they write a single line of business logic.Recently, industry leaders have showcased "Harness Engineering" [1][2] — the practice of building autonomous agent workflows that handle end-to-end coding tasks. While their results are inspiring, the barrier to entry can feel insurmountable.The challenge for most teams is finding a starting…
The Gap is RealIf your accessibility process ends with a passing scan, your users with disabilities are likely encountering barriers you do not know about.Automated tools are useful. LLM-assisted auditing has raised the ceiling. Neither closes the gap between what a tool can verify and what a person actually experiences when navigating with a screen reader. The gap is real, it is measurable, and it has organizational consequences.I have spent years running every category of automated accessibility tool the industry has produced: rule-based scanners like axe-core and WAVE, visual analyzers…
Navigating ChangeThe way we interact with software is shifting. Instead of clicking through web interfaces and learning different UIs for each system, some people are moving toward natural language as the interface - telling an AI what they want done, and it handles the task completion for them. This shift is happening now, but there's been a missing piece: how does the AI actually connect to and control those systems? MCP DefinedMCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open protocol that gives AI models a standardised interface to external tools and data sources. Think of it as a USB-C for AI -…
This technology platform, called 'Just Walk Out', required over 1,000 workers in India manually reviewing video footage to verify transactions. By 2022, 700 out of every 1,000 sales needed human review. Amazon pulled the technology from their Fresh grocery stores in 2024. They paved the way. But it wasn't sustainable.The problem wasn't the concept. It was the complexity. Grocery stores carry thousands of SKUs, items without barcodes, and unpredictable customer behavior at scale. In fact, this same technology is succeeding in stadiums and small-format stores. Mashgin kiosks are deployed across…
"I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."Joanna Maciejewska I'm sure you've seen this quote from Joanna Maciejewska all over social media; I'd bet some money that there are shops already selling t-shirts and mugs with it. Despite seeing it dozens of times, I never thought about it in the context of my day-to-day as a programmer! I, like the quote's author, was more focused on AI hijacking the "classical" creative work such as painting and writing, instead of helping us humans with the…
The Evolution of Craft: How I Embraced AI in Software DevelopmentOne Sunday morning after a church service I was enjoying a cup of tea, cake and warm conversations with fellow parishioners. One of the conversations with a particular individual shifted to work and I learned that he works in the energy sector. More specifically, he is an engineering manager for an organization specializing in renewables where he oversees a number of solar arrays and other supporting infrastructure crucial for operational efficiency.He told me he was actively recruiting to in-source the development of their…
Optional Google Analytics helps us understand visits. Microsoft Clarity records masked interactions to improve the site. Optional tools stay off unless you choose them. Privacy details.