Back from Austin and Supercharging AI Agents with Embabel
Happy Monday, friends! I hope you all had a great week. I just got back from the Arc of AI conference in Austin, TX, and it was a blast. There's something about getting out of your normal routine and connecting with other developers in person that recharges the batteries. I got to have some great conversations about where Spring and AI agents are heading, and it was cool to see how many folks in the community are already building with these tools.
Nate (my friend and co-author) gave an 8-hour workshop on where the fundamentals of software engineering fit in the age of AI. It was a great group of attendees who brought some great energy and a bunch of insightful questions throughout the day.
Video Recaps
Embabel MCP + Tools
I put together a video showing how to supercharge your AI agents with tools and MCP servers in Embabel. If you haven't been following along, Embabel is a really interesting framework for building AI agents, and one of the things that makes agents truly useful is giving them access to tools and external services through the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
In this video, I walk through the full setup from scratch. You'll see how to wire up tools that your agents can call, how to connect MCP servers so your agents can interact with external systems, and how it all fits together in a clean, Spring-friendly way. If you're building AI agents in the Java ecosystem and want to go beyond simple prompt-and-response workflows, this one's for you.
The response on this one has been great. It's clear that a lot of you are ready to move past the "hello world" phase of AI agents and start building something real. Give it a watch and let me know what you think.
Spring Office Hours
In the latest episode of Spring Office Hours, we had Arun Gupta join us for a conversation about developer soft skills (S5E12). This is a topic that doesn't get enough attention in our world. We spend so much time talking about frameworks and libraries, but the skills that often make the biggest difference in your career are communication, collaboration, and knowing how to navigate a team. Arun brought some really practical advice from his years of experience. Definitely worth a listen if you missed it.
This coming week is a potluck episode (S5E13) where DaShaun and I answer your questions. These are some of my favorite episodes because we never know what's coming. Send us your questions!
Looking ahead, we've got an incredible lineup. On April 27th, Rod Johnson is joining us to talk about Spring and Embabel (S5E14). Yes, that Rod Johnson. And on May 4th, Simon Martinelli stops by to discuss spec-driven development (S5E15). Check out the full schedule at springofficehours.io/schedule and make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss these.
Can You Trust AI-Generated Code? It Depends on What You Already Know
This article over at ByteSized AI digs into a question a lot of us are wrestling with: how much should you trust the code that AI generates for you? The short answer is that it really depends on your existing knowledge of the domain.
It's something I've been thinking about a lot as I use AI coding agents more and more. When I ask AI about a framework I've never used, it feels like magic. Everything looks great and I'm flying. But when I ask it about Spring code I've been writing for years, I catch mistakes on every line. That's Gell-Mann amnesia in action: we trust the AI's output in areas we can't verify while knowing it's unreliable in areas we can. This is exactly why the fundamentals matter more now, not less. AI is an incredible tool, but you need enough knowledge to know when it's wrong. If you're leaning on AI-generated code in areas you don't understand, you're building on a foundation you can't inspect. Give it a read and let me know if your experience lines up with mine.
Tweets
The trailer for the upcoming Spring Documentary is out, and wow, is it good. I'm not going to lie, I almost cried watching this!
Until Next Week
That's all I've got for this week. If you have questions about Embabel, Spring AI, or anything else I covered, just hit reply. I read every response, and it helps me figure out what to cover next. Have a great week, and I'll talk to you next Monday!
Happy Coding,
Dan Vega
https://www.danvega.dev