ACM Queue

10/05/2026

The Coding Philosopher

Out of My Other Mind

What would it take to convince us that an AI is conscious?

Philosophers and scientists have debated the idea of consciousness for centuries, to no clear conclusion. The stakes of the argument have ramped up as AI accelerates. What are the defining characteristics of a conscious AI?

What would it take to convince us that an AI is conscious? Philosophers and scientists have debated the idea of consciousness for centuries, to no clear conclusion. The stakes of the argument have ramped up as AI accelerates. What are the defining characteristics of a conscious AI?

10/05/2026

Running an Agentic Threat Model
Workflow, abuse cases, and runtime controls

Helping security and engineering teams extend established threat-modeling practices to autonomous systems without relying on the AI model to enforce critical security boundaries

Workflow, abuse cases, and runtime controls Agentic AI systems change the security assumptions behind traditional threat modeling. Rather than simply executing predefined logic, agents interpret objectives, retrieve context, select tools, delegate tasks, maintain memory, and compose actions ...

09/28/2026

A Valid Tool Call Can Still Be an Invalid Effect

Why consequential agent actions need a semantic read set

Agent tool protocols make functions discoverable through names, descriptions, and argument schemas. That is enough to form a request but not enough for a consequential system to decide whether the resulting effect is still acceptable. Traditional software usually fixes a transaction pattern in code: which state is read, which authority is consulted, which conditions are checked, and which target is updated. An agent can assemble that pattern at runtime and emit only the final write, allowing the material read set to disappear into model context, tool transcripts, or logs.

This article calls this interface failure read-set erasure, defines the missing information as the effect’s semantic read set, and proposes a dependency-carrying effect: a canonical effect, target-required dependencies, bounded authority, replay semantics, and an explicit commit topology. The agent may propose dependencies, but the protected effect type and target must define the checks that cannot be omitted. A detached pre-dispatch verifier is not atomic; systems must state whether they provide target-native conditional commit, reservation-bound ex*****on, or saga-bound dispatch. The mechanisms are familiar: conditional writes, optimistic validation, reservations, idempotency, and sagas. The contribution is an interface discipline that preserves the justification for an agent-generated effect until the system of record can accept, hold, or refuse it.

Why consequential agent actions need a semantic read set Agent tool protocols make functions discoverable through names, descriptions, and argument schemas. That is enough to form a request but not enough for a consequential system to decide whether the resulting effect is still acceptable. Traditio...

09/24/2026

CAFE(S): Your Agent Is Only As Good As Its Context

Five durable properties for evaluating context quality

As organizations delegate increasingly complex software tasks to AI agents, engineering leaders often attribute system failures to model capabilities or harness orchestration. Even state-of-the-art models, however, degrade rapidly when operating on unclear, incomplete, or stale inputs. We present CAFE(S), a diagnostic-quality framework that evaluates assembled context across five core dimensions: clarity, actionability, fidelity, efficiency, and security. CAFE(S) provides a shared vocabulary for identifying recurring context failures—from ambiguous requirements and impossible tasks to excessive noise and unsafe inputs—and for reasoning about how those failures affect human-agent work. We argue that context quality is a first-class engineering concern that can be deliberately designed, evaluated, and maintained. Organizations that systematically strengthen the information environments in which agents operate will be far better positioned to realize their full potential.

Five durable properties for evaluating context quality As organizations delegate increasingly complex software tasks to AI agents, engineering leaders often attribute system failures to model capabilities or harness orchestration. Even state-of-the-art models, however, degrade rapidly when operating...

09/21/2026

Finding the Real Bottleneck in Large-Scale ML Training

Real efficiency requires fixing the underlying systems

Planning meetings across AI infrastructure teams are routinely dominated by accelerator provisioning and physical supply shortages. An equally critical and often overlooked constraint is operational efficiency. In production training clusters, actual model ex*****on frequently consumes only half of an accelerator’s theoretical capacity. This 50 percent utilization drag is driven by compounding system overheads. When cluster utilization drops, runtimes increase and effective ex*****on costs double even when model architectures and hardware remain identical. This article deconstructs the primary sources of compute loss in large-scale distributed ML systems, evaluating real-world scaling degradation across MLPerf benchmark ceilings and multitenant production traces. It demonstrates why rigorous workload placement discipline, bare-metal AI topologies, and establishing Model FLOPs Utilization (MFU) as a primary operational SLA must be made a priority alongside hardware procurement to control total cost of ownership (TCO).

Real efficiency requires fixing the underlying systemsPlanning meetings across AI infrastructure teams are routinely dominated by accelerator provisioning and physical supply shortages. An equally critical and often overlooked constraint is operational efficiency. In production training clusters, ac...

09/17/2026

Signs of a Brewing Crisis

Crises have the destabilizing power to shift incentives and invert power structures.

Crisis is a label often applied to the conditions of an organization’s complex systems by practitioners and by managers to coerce prioritization. Infrequently, it is used to describe a situation nearest its definition: a crucial turning point of change, which requires adaptive resilience for procession.

There are technical and organizational practices that are effective, or available, only during a real crisis. With a combination of existing research, lived experience, and real-world examples, this article outlines a set of five criteria useful for evaluating the presence or imminence of a crisis: fundamental surprise, failure of sensemaking, disruption of core processes, high visibility, and a rigid deadline.

Ability to identify and evaluate these circumstances can allow operators and engineers to anticipate opportunities when adaptive resilience will be required—when a different set of technical features and organizational behaviors will be most successful in the management and operations of complex systems.

09/14/2026

What’s in Your Software Repair Kit?
The things you wish you had before a crisis

You can’t prevent or predict the next systems meltdown. But you can build resilience into your systems and organization before the next crisis strikes. Drawing on decades of site reliability engineering (SRE) experience and dozens of engagements with organizations in crisis, this article suggests technical and organizational patterns that will give your systems better odds of surviving the unexpected.

The things you wish you had before a crisisYou can’t prevent or predict the next systems meltdown. But you can build resilience into your systems and organization before the next crisis strikes. Drawing on decades of site reliability engineering (SRE) experience and dozens of engagements with ...

09/09/2026

Data Architectures in the Age of AI

Every computing era creates a new software stack

Every major computing shift has reshaped the software stack, but one assumption held across all of them: Humans were the primary consumers of software.

AI agents break this assumption. An autonomous agent determines at runtime what data it needs, interprets it, and takes action, with no human in the loop to catch misinterpretations.

That change lands hardest on the data layer. Today’s platforms are adding AI capabilities to existing warehouse-, lake-, and application-centric architectures. But bolting AI features onto existing stacks isn’t enough. The data layer must be rethought from first principles to meet the requirements of autonomous agents.

This article identifies and discusses three imperative changes: Business semantics must be machine readable and continuously synchronized, federation must become the default for operational workflows, and governance must shift from controlling access to governing autonomous behavior. These changes are essential to building effective AI agents.

09/09/2026

How CHERIoT Provides Strong and Able Isolation Without an MMU

Co-design of hardware and software offers stronger security and ease of use

CHERIoT is optimized for small devices but showcases what is possible at any scale if you start by assuming CHERI.

09/04/2026

Kode Vicious
When You Wish Upon a Prompt
Relying on an LLM doesn’t teach how to write code

With the current LLMs, anyone can generate a working program, but a program is not a system. Today’s students must be taught not how to spot an errant asterisk, but how all the components of a system work together. This means more mentoring, debugging large working systems, and asking hard questions about how a system looks when it is properly put together.

Relying on an LLM doesn’t teach how to write code With the current LLMs, anyone can generate a working program, but a program is not a system. Today’s students must be taught not how to spot an errant asterisk, but how all the components of a system work together. This means more mentoring, debu...