Your team is shipping more AI-written code every quarter. How do you know it is any good?Good means it meets your standards, and you have probably already tried handing your agents the standards: a context file, a style guide, the wiki pasted into the prompt. The agent reads them, agrees, and still ...

Working at 8th Light, we have the daily privilege of collaborating with truly brilliant minds—people who bridge the gap between deep engineering and meaningful human connection. We are also incredibly fortunate to work alongside folks who, no matter how tough the problem or early the hour, are overf...

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 m...

Congratulations to Kevin Buchanan, our latest Beacon Award recipient, a peer-nominated honor that celebrates the people who bring our values to life and light the way for others to follow. Kevin, Principal Engineer, has been an 8th Light for over 12 years. A long-time favorite of our clients and his...

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 yea...

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 ...

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...

At 8th Light, we help healthcare organizations design and build AI-enabled systems that put people first, combining product strategy, human-centered design, and technology leadership to create innovative solutions that work for clinicians as well as patients. Why This MattersAlthough AI continues to...

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. Thi...

The 8th Light Beacon Award is an honor that recognizes distinguished individuals or teams who bring 8th Light’s values to the frontlines, inspiring and enabling the way for others to follow in their footsteps.As we closed out 2025, we recognized a team that carried 8th Light’s values beyond our scre...

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 ...

Digital transformation always sounds clear in an RFP or slide deck, but in practice things can get fuzzy fast. What exactly are we transforming? Is this about customers, or about ourselves? Are we reshaping workflows, or the entire business model? Without answers to these questions, projects stall, ...

This is Part 1 in our blog series on how the design process works alongside Agile methodology to produce results within an integrated team.Updated 2/5/2026. Originally published 2/2/2024 When it comes to developing new software, not every designer approaches the task the same way. While some use a d...

At Lumen Field, Amazon One runs across concessions, merch, and age-restricted gates. With over 69,000 fans per game, every second at checkout compounds. Fans hover their palm. Move through. No card. No PIN. No wallet.The Seattle Seahawks adopted it for a simple reason. Every moment spent waiting is ...

It’s the mid-90s, it’s Sunday morning, and you’re about to set your VCRs to record on your NFL game of choiceYou’d capture everything, commercials, dead time, halftime filler, and hope the tape didn’t cut out in overtime. It was static. One-size-fits-all.Then TiVo arrived. That pause button changed ...

Updated 1/16/2026. Originally published 12/10/2024As we talked about in Part 1 of this blog series, The Design Process and Agile Development: Part 1 — Design Is Collaborative, the design process provides teams with the opportunity to join forces, paving the way for an integrated team of user experie...

What a difference a year makes.When Netflix secured WWE Raw, a three-hour weekly live broadcast with more than three decades of history, it marked a turning point. Raw is chaos in motion: fan-fueled, unpredictable, impossible to rehearse. And now Netflix has to make it flawless. More than a licensin...

Congratulations to Pierce Edmiston and Hugh Sato, our latest recipients of 8th Light’s Beacon Award! Our Beacon Award recognizes team members who exemplify 8th Light's values and inspire us all.Pierce and Hugh represent two different strengths within 8th Light that come together to create meaningful...

"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 selli...

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 energ...

How to make your customers happy and your engineers even happierIt’s common for monitoring and alerting solutions on production services to be quite chatty, sometimes producing hundreds of notifications per day. There’s a scene in the classic film The Matrix where one of the characters (Cypher) is l...

Updated 7/25/2025. Originally published 12/10/2024  Ambiguity in design isn’t a roadblock — it’s an opportunity. Design ingenuity thrives in the gray area where rules haven’t been written, and solutions are waiting to be discovered.So how do you turn “I have no idea where to start” into breakthrough...

Why It Matters At 8th Light, we help enterprise teams remove friction, foster alignment, and build tools that scale with confidence. This project exemplifies what happens when human-driven design meets technical rigor: major time and cost savings. By focusing on systems thinking, user needs, and res...

Congratulations to Rani Zilpelwar, the recipient of 8th Light’s Quarterly Beacon Award, a peer-nominated honor that celebrates team members who shine light on our core values.Rani is a Software Delivery Lead with over a decade of experience building high-quality software and high-trust teams. This q...

Bottom Line Up FrontThe goal isn't to replace human developers but to offload repetitive tasks so we can focus on creativity and architecture—where human expertise is irreplaceable. Start your next feature by writing tests first, then let AI help implement the solution. You'll deliver higher quality...

In today’s competitive gaming landscape, visual fidelity can make or break a title’s success. Yet as game worlds grow increasingly complex, traditional methods of ensuring visual quality are breaking down. Manual visual verification has become increasingly impractical. Even when teams scale up testi...

Technical documentation is a critical part of any software development environment. Clear, maintainable documentation empowers teams, boosts productivity, and preserves vital knowledge. Yet, keeping documentation accurate, consistent, and up-to-date can be challenging. Fortunately, there are effecti...

Have you ever spent hours searching for essential information or found yourself stuck with confusing setup errors, only to realize the answers are undocumented and "known" by a select few team members? When you hear "technical documentation," do you run for the hills, or try to offload the task to s...

This is part three of the three-part blog series based on Your Strategic Playbook for DevOps Victory. Successfully launching a DevOps strategy can significantly boost an organization's efficiency and productivity. However, as with any major business decision, adopting a new DevOps strategy requires ...

This is part two of a three-part blog series based on Your Strategic Playbook for DevOps Victory. DevOps has become the backbone of modern software development, critical for delivering high-quality software products and keeping customers happy. It was created to break down traditional functional bar...