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…
8th Light
https://8thlight.com/blog/ · 25 posts · history since 2025 · active
17 May
5 May
Why This Matters in the Era of Agentic Everything The 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]…
15 Apr
The Gap is Real If 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…
6 Mar
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 Matters Although AI continues to dominate healthtech headlines, many frontline clinicians are still battling clunky systems, fragmented workflows, and administrative overload. The…
25 Feb
Navigating Change The 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:…
24 Feb
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 screens and onto a global stage. Team Nimrods made up…
16 Feb
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…
13 Feb
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, swirl, or never quite get started in the first place. As a Certified…
5 Feb
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 design thinking approach, looking at the tasks from a user perspective,…
30 Jan
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 a moment not watching, not buying, not coming back. Palm recognition…
23 Jan
It’s the mid-90s, it’s Sunday morning, and you’re about to set your VCRs to record on your NFL game of choice You’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 the game. Suddenly, fans could freeze a field goal, run to…
16 Jan
Updated 1/16/2026. Originally published 12/10/2024 As 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 experience (UX) designers, product owners, and agile software development to create a…
6 Jan
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 licensing play. It’s an engineering gauntlet. Pulling it off means delivering…
21 Nov 2025
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, high-impact work for our clients. Pierce, Sr. Principal Engineer blends scientific rigor with technical…
10 Sept 2025
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…
21 Aug 2025
The Evolution of Craft: How I Embraced AI in Software Development One 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…
18 Aug 2025
How to make your customers happy and your engineers even happier It’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 looking at a screen with green unintelligible code. He’s asked: “Do you…
25 Jul 2025
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 ideas that actually work? At 8th Light, our approach is anchored in…
18 Jul 2025
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 resilient architecture, the organization created a path forward that supports both immediate impact and long-term…
11 Jul 2025
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 quarter, Rani’s leadership and influence grew significantly beyond her original role with one of the…
28 May 2025
Bottom Line Up Front The 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 code faster, with greater confidence. Large Language Models Aren't as Simple as They…
22 May 2025
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 testing, small rendering anomalies can introduce severe regressions that go unnoticed until later stages of development, leading to…
2 May 2025
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 effective ways to advocate for its importance. Leading by Example Becoming an advocate for high-quality documentation starts with your own work. While working with a…
25 Apr 2025
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 someone else? Technical documentation is often treated as an afterthought,…
23 Apr 2025
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 the investment and satisfaction of various stakeholders. When considering key performance indicators (KPIs) for navigating the shift…