Off-by-none: Issue #336

September 16, 2025

I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords 👾

In our previous issue, we celebrated 7 years of Off-by-none, Cloudflare brought Node.js HTTP servers to Workers, and Databricks raised a billion dollars. This week, Amazon Lex learns eight new languages, LocalStack comes to VS Code, and the CDK gets a refactor button (that still outputs CDK). Plus, we've got plenty of content from the amazing serverless and cloud community!

News & Announcements

AWS had some updates this week that are definitely worth looking at. Amazon Lex now supports generative AI–powered NLU in eight new languages, which should make building multilingual bots a whole lot less painful (and they sound really good). AWS Organizations added account state visibility, which for most people doesn't sound like a big deal, but once you start managing 5,000 accounts in a single org, you'll see why this is super useful for some of us.

On the DevEx side of things, LocalStack integration in VS Code now makes local testing for serverless apps much easier (though I'm still not a fan of mocking the cloud locally). And if you’re a CDK user that's just one more construct away from an unmanageable ball of spaghetti, the new CDK Refactor (Preview) command promises automated, "safe" refactoring. Unfortunately, it still refactors it to CDK. 🤷

And in case you missed it, the AWS Weekly Roundup highlighted Strands Agents crossing 1M+ downloads. Glad they weren't pushing Bedrock Agents so hard earlier this year. It'd be a shame if a team of developers spent months building out AI workloads with the multi-agent orchestrator only to find out that it was never going to get any good. #notbitter

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Tutorials

• It's My Birthday and I'm Giving YOU the Gift: Serverless MCP Servers That Cost Less Than Birthday Cake 🎂 by Matt Martz
• Implementing Automated Resource Tagging Across AWS Organizations by Mohammad Jomaa
• Part 2: Automating News Alerts with AWS Lambda, SNS, and Event Bridge! by Girish Bhatia
• Queues, Buses, and Streams by Seth Orell
• Developing with LocalStack using the AWS Toolkit for VS Code by Peter Smith PhD
• DuckDB on AWS Lambda: The Easy Way with Layers | Benjamin Bourgeois by Benjamin Bourgeois
• I Built a Modern Serverless JS Full-Stack Framework in One Day by Ahmed Rakan
• Build your AI apps faster — Cloud Run now supports modern Python frameworks by Apoorva Sridharan
• Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime - Part 5 Using Custom Agent with Spring AI by Vadym Kazulkin

Reads

• Key Takeaways from AWS Community Day Baltic 2025: Attendee Insights by Bartosz Górski
• Scaling Carmen Cloud: From Containers to Lambda SnapStart by László Tóth
• How a Data Migration Project Cost Us 100x More Than Planned

Podcasts, Videos, and more

• Lambda Live Debugger and Other Tips and Tricks for Debugging Serverless Applications
• New LocalStack integrations | Serverless Office Hours

New from AWS

• Malware Protection for S3 Expands File Size and Archive Scanning Limits
• Amazon OpenSearch Service announces Derived Source for storage optimization
• AWS launches CloudTrail MCP Server for enhanced security analysis
• Amazon RDS Proxy announces support for end-to-end IAM authentication
• Amazon Athena launches single sign-on support for drivers
• Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway supports AWS PrivateLink invocation and invocation logging
• Announcing on-demand deployment for custom Meta Llama models in Amazon Bedrock

Upcoming Events 🗓

October 16, 2025 - AWS North Community Conference

October 25, 2025 - Serverless Days Milan 2025

December 1-5, 2025 - AWS re:Invent 2025

Please send me your serverless events!

Final Thoughts 🤔

This past week, I had a bit of an epiphany. I've been working with a fleet of AI agents and tools (Claude Code, Warp, ChatGPT, ChatGPT scheduled tasks, and others), and it has completely transformed my workflow. I now find myself working on four or more things at once, experimenting faster than I could ever have imagined. This recent productivity boost is insane, and I’ve cranked out more (pretty good) software and automations in the last two weeks than I have in the last two years! And it's literally addicting. I've worked until after midnight almost every night this week, simply because… I just want to build!

I even fell back in love with frontend development. React, Svelte, Next.js, Solid… these frameworks all passed me by while I was busy building startups and backends. I never had the time to master them, but I've built hundreds of websites since I first started in 1997, and the AI coding assistants remove the toil and friction and let me use my (surprisingly not that rusty) debugging skills to build some really exciting things. Seriously, it's like a never ending stream of dopamine hits! 😬

I don’t know how the future’s going to play out with AI, but right now I feel like we all have superpowers. The question is: what are we going to do with them?

Until next week,
Jeremy

I hope you enjoyed this newsletter. We're always looking for ideas and feedback to make it better and more inclusive, so please feel free to reach out to me via Bluesky, LinkedIn, X, or email.