James Ward

The past 3 months have been the most intense and fruitful of my entire career. I've been cooking, coding, vibing, architecting, designing, imagining, and delivering production systems while teaching developers around the world how to build enterprise-grade AI systems. I'm on my way home from the amazing Spring I/O conference and reflecting on the seemingly insane number of things I've delivered / helped with over the past few months. Here are the most interesting: - SkillsJars: Agent Skills for the JVM ecosystem. Gaining rapid ecosystem adoption for enterprise needs. - javadocs.dev: Improvements for Java / Kotlin / Scala library Agent Experience (Valkey caching, more MCP tools, a new Scala ZIO HTTP MCP library to power it) - ai4jvm.com: A curated AI resource list for Java & Kotlin developers (along with a generalized approach to spec driven, AI assisted websites) - Spring AI AgentCore 1.0: The easy way to deliver enterprise-grade AI Agents & MCP servers on AWS - acp2web: Local code assistants available anywhere via ACP - MCP server for my Effect Oriented Programming book - MCP server for the Spring AI book that Josh Long are working on Along the way I presented and led hands-on Spring AI / Bedrock & MCP sessions at Jfokus, DevNexus, JavaOne, Voxxed Amsterdam, AI4J, Spring I/O, and GIDS in Bangalore next week. And I joined the Agentic AI Foundation Technical Committee, helping steer standards for the agentic world. It has been a wild ride and I'm loving how AI has empowered me to move at a pace that a year ago was inconceivable. There is much more to come and I’m grateful for the support and collaboration with so many amazing people!

It is cool to see @goose_oss using ACP! Harness as an ACP Server. Any IDE as an ACP Client. Goose TUI as ACP Client. And maybe a remote-control web app as an ACP Client. Great & versatile architecture. ACP provides easy choice/swapping of harness & UI.

Well their 2026.15 release broke auto-pilot / cruise-control 🤦‍♂️

My @Rivian is a decent vehicle but I don’t have much confidence in their Assistant delivering what I really want. Their overall software quality gets a D grade. So many regressions in every release. And they continue to fall further behind what is available with CarPlay.

@AffableAlpaca @RivianTrackr Exactly. It is Rivian’s fault for not supporting stuff that actually works.

@RivianTrackr CarPlay has a wonderful integration with text messaging!

Rivian Assistant can do a lot of things. Replying to your group chat over Bluetooth is not one of them. And no, it's not really Rivian's fault. Here's what's going on: riviantrackr.com/news/why-rivia…

@Deep_Star_Six @brunoborges @khmarbaise You can use @WebJars for a safer option

@JamesWard @brunoborges @khmarbaise there is mvnpm where you have the worst of both worlds, and maven gradle have init scripts and other surfaces to spread. Maven is an abomination, and the fact it is barely usable slow and unstable -SNAPSHOT? wont stop worms from spreading.

Waiting for these things to spread across Maven Central...

@why_oleg Nice! I'd love to integrate support for this into javadocs.dev - we need to shift the JVM community from javadocs for humans, to javadocs for agents.

Documentation tooling in Kotlin has been an afterthought for too long. New KEEP proposes to change that Kotlin Documentation Model - a stable, machine-readable representation of your module's KDoc and API surface, integrated into the Kotlin Build Tools! github.com/Kotlin/KEEP/di…

Time for a whole new open source supply chain. @KeybaseIO would be a great foundation! Who owns the commits in the history? Who tagged the release? What machine were they on? Which CI built it? What pushed to the registry? Sign and validate every step with multiple factors.

@controlflow Here are the ones I know of that are Effect Oriented: veralang.dev aria-lang.com averlang.dev moglang.org alliecatowo.github.io/lumen/ dreamlang.dev

@JamesWard Any examples of the “new AI Native programming languages”?

It’s no surprise that many of the new AI Native programming languages are Effect Oriented (Algebraic Effects). If you are creating a new AI Native programming language, why would you go any other route??

@gAmUssA @SandonJacobs Ouch. Hurts my heart. btw, next time I see you I have a @HappyPathProg sticker for you :)

A new laptop - who dis? A postcard to @SandonJacobs and @JamesWard

@ikolomiets @relizarov I only looked briefly at Zig’s new IO thingy. Maybe @grok knows.

@relizarov @JamesWard So the latest change in Zig’s IO in its stdlib that requires passing an explicit IO parameter (context) is “co-effects”? Good to know.

@fwbrasil 💯

@JamesWard Algebraic effects with rich static typing is the perfect substrate for reliable AI agents. I find it interesting how people still reason about the value of their work in terms of human adoption. All tech stacks will eventually have a single main kind of user: AI agents

@RhysSullivan @EffectTS_ 🎯

With agents writing code I’ve become more bullish than ever on Effect and the problems it solves If you’re not using it, I’m curious on why and what you’re using instead to solve the same challenges - interested to see what the ecosystem looks like

The agent should move at the speed of the verification, not the speed of the typing

@steren of course it depends on what the agent is and who the user is and what their agent control surface is and what the tool is doing and what capabilities the tool needs.

Agent tools:

Now more true than ever!

Ahh I have been so excited about the new AWS Agent Toolkit and it's finally here and I can talk about it! 🚀 40+ skills 🚀 3 agent plugins 🚀 Remote MCP server that agents can use to call all 15,000+ AWS APIs + run scripts, search docs, retrieve skills github.com/aws/agent-tool…

Yes! And this is the reason why Effect Oriented Programming is such a super power in the AI code assistant era.

AWS Docs now available in markdown: # Change the extension curl docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/… # Content negotiation curl -H "Accept:text/markdown" docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/… # llms.txt at guide root to assist in AI discovery curl docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/… (Markdown button also on page)