Tech
Stop Using Your Laptop at the Dinner Table Already
Kristianne Egbert has worked in occupational ergonomics for nearly 20 years and is now a senior corporate ergonomist at Briotix Health, a workplace injury prevention company. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Egbert also says that repeated use of a laptop alone on a desk is going to have a huge effect on your overall posture.
Egbert referred to what’s known as the 20-degree rule. If you’re holding your neck at an angle of 20 degrees or more, you’re officially crossing the risk threshold. “You’re probably bending over because you’re leaning forward to see that screen and be able to reach the keyboard,” she says.
Sitting back farther in your chair might seem like a fix to the problem temporarily, but in reality, bending beyond 20 degrees isn’t the real issue. Most people aren’t comfortable holding that position for long periods of time, which means it’s what else your body does to compensate that’s problematic.
“Nobody really wants to bend their head that much more than 20 degrees,” Egbert says. “So, when you don’t want to bend your neck forward, then the rest of your body is going to try and accommodate.”
You might tilt your whole back forward to avoid that extreme neck posture to type on the keyboard and see the screen of your laptop. That’s where bad posture habits really form. It’s not that you need to just suck it up and have better posture. You need to change the way you’re working, not necessarily your discipline.
“The other thing that ends up happening when your back starts getting tired is you’re like, ‘OK, well, I’m gonna scoot back a little bit to keep my back a little straighter,’” she says, demonstrating the position over the Zoom call. “But then, my arms are going to come out a little bit more, and I’m anchoring my wrist down while I’m typing.” This position can cause all sorts of other problems.
It’s even worse for shorter people, who are often working from chairs that aren’t tall enough. Egbert often recommends putting the laptop down on the lap, so that your arms can be down “where they belong.” You can tilt the laptop screen and look down at it, cutting the risk of leaning forward too much.
What to Do Instead
Fortunately, there are some simple (and even affordable!) solutions to this ergonomic disaster. Both experts I interviewed indicated that your office chair is a good place to start for better posture and office ergonomics. (We have an excellent guide that can help.)
The base of the lamp has two slider buttons. One toggle adjusts the warmth, from cold white light all the way to red. One adjusts the intensity, from ultra-bright down to a glareless glow. Hard taps on each button skip ahead, while holding the toggle down on one side or another adjusts the light settings quite slowly—slowly enough I at first sometimes question whether it’s happening.
The maximum brightness is 1,000 lumens—the approximate intensity of a 75-watt incandescent bulb. At this brightness, the battery lasts about five hours. At a lower intensity, this can extend to as long as a dozen hours.
Red Shift
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
There’s an added feature I have come to appreciate at night, which is the red-light mode. There’s little evidence that blue light from your little smartphone is keeping you awake at night. But numerous studies do show that blue light wavelengths can affect melatonin levels and thus your body’s circadian rhythm, while red light doesn’t do this.
Red light therapy is, of course, the province of TikTok as much as science—a field where wild exaggerations live alongside legitimate uses and benefits. For every sleep study showing that red light is superior to blue light when it comes to melatonin levels, there’s another showing that red light is associated with “negative emotions” before bed.
So I can only offer my own experience, which is that Edge Light Go’s red reading light offers me a pleasant liminal space between awake time and sleepy time, one not offered by a basic nightstand lamp. It allows me to sort of bask in a darkroom space that still lets me see and read, and drift off a little easier.
If I fall asleep, the light has an automatic 25-minute shut-off, which means I won’t do what I far too often do, which is drift off while reading and then wake up, alarmed, to a room filled with bright light in the middle of the night.
Caveats and Quirks
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
This said, for all the virtues of portability, the Edge Light Go does not boast a base that’s heavy enough to stop the lamp from tipping over if I bend it forward from its lowest hinge. This can be an annoyance when trying to use the lamp as a reading light from a bedside table or the arm of a couch.
For decades, engineering teams treated code like a vintage Ferrari – expensive to build, painstakingly maintained and too precious to ever throw away. Every line represented a significant investment of human capital and time, and has led to a culture where code was cherished and its longevity was a marker of success.
But at the AWS Summit in London this week, Ryan Cormack, principal engineer at online used car marketplace Motorway, consigned that philosophy to the scrapyard. In the age of agentic artificial intelligence (AI-)driven software development, he says, engineering teams can become more productive and are able to build, revise and maintain code at speeds previously unthinkable.
In this article, we look at Motorway’s radical shift from manual coding to an AI-first development pipeline powered by AWS Kiro. Cormack talks about how the company achieved a 4x increase in engineering output, the challenges that come with the ability to produce more code, why the future of software development lies in treating code as disposable, and the core benefits of codifying organisational culture into AI steering files.
The mindset shift: Disposability vs polish
The most profound change at Motorway is speed of delivery but also a psychological break from the past. Historically, writing code was a “time-expensive process”, Cormack says, adding: “We wanted to have code that was so good that we could cherish it for years to come, because we had invested so much time into making it.”
But since starting to use Kiro – AWS’s agentic AI-capable IDE – that mindset became a bottleneck. “We shifted away from, ‘We need the most well-polished code for every line we write, all the time’, because we can rewrite it again tomorrow at a speed that’s never been possible before,” says Cormack.
This has led to a strategy of “evaluation over production”. Motorway now generates vast amounts of code – a million lines a month – much of which may never reach a customer, says Cormack. Instead, it is used to test and evaluate multiple different ways to solve a problem before committing to it.
The lesson for other organisations is clear. Don’t aim for a perfect first pass. Use AI to cycle through iterations, then use human expertise to refine exactly what you want from the options the AI helps provide.
Managing the ‘volume crisis’: Rigour over speed
While a 4x increase in output sounds like an engineering dream, it creates a real “review bottleneck”. If you write 400% more code but maintain 100% manual review processes, the system collapses. To combat this, Motorway hollowed out the “manual middle” of the development process and moved human energy to the ends of the process – namely, the spec and the review.
“We find ourselves spending more time planning code and the whole process up front, and a little bit more time reviewing what comes out,” Cormack says. “But we lose all this time in the middle where we previously had to manually write all the code.”
To ensure AI doesn’t just produce any code but “Motorway code”, the team utilises “steering files”. These files augment the AI’s system prompts with the company’s specific DNA. They are specific to Kiro and are markdown documents that contain instructions, standards and preferences to guide the AI behaviour and coding style.
They include, for example, naming conventions that standardise how application programming interfaces (APIs) are labelled across Motorway’s 7,500-dealer network, and design patterns that enforce specific software architectures.
By injecting these rules via the AI, generated code looks and feels like it was written by a veteran Motorway engineer.
And AI isn’t just used for the build; it’s used for the full lifecycle. “We need to use AI to help us debug, analyse, understand, and evaluate systems as they run,” Cormack adds, noting that agents now monitor logs and metrics to help humans manage a massive fleet of services.
The ‘Kiro’ engine and model agnosticism
A critical component of Motorway’s success is that Kiro acts as an agentic loop rather than just a simple “autocomplete” tool.
“Kiro knows how our CI pipelines work,” says Cormack. “It knows how our infrastructure is code-driven and it knows how our internal applications work together. It’s able to help guide us every step of the way.
“We’re using Kiro across our full software development lifecycle. Our product and UX teams can ship real prototypes into our customers’ hands quicker than we’ve ever been able to before. What would take weeks now takes hours.”
His team can leverage its model agnosticism too. Cormack explained they aren’t locked into a single LLM: “We use Kiro with Claude’s latest Opus 4.7 model, we use it with some of the open weight models, things like Meta’s Llama models … we’re able to selectively pick the LLM that we know is going to be able to best perform the specific task.”
This flexibility helps to mitigate the risk of hallucinations. Motorway relies on a spec-driven approach where the AI must think through the problem and generate a technical design before writing a single line.
“It will help us write automated tests that are able to prove that each of these points has been accurately done,” Cormack says. This means the AI provides its own proof of work before a human ever touches it.
Legacy transition from Heroku to AWS
Motorway wasn’t always this agile. The company was “born in the cloud”, on Heroku, which Cormack acknowledges was “great for scaling and getting going”. But as the company grew, it hit friction points.
The transition to AWS was driven by a need for “flexibility, adaptability, and scalability”, says Cormack, who views their Kiro-enabled AI-first pipeline as the ultimate tool for such transitions.
If he were to do things all over again, Cormack says he would “adopt this model of thinking much earlier on”. The ability to use AI to map migration logic and service dependencies would have saved months of manual effort during the move off their legacy platform, he believes.
Lessons for the boardroom
For organisations that want to replicate Motorway’s 250% increase in deployment frequency, Cormack warns against automating the grind of coding without also automating the rigour of testing.
“If you try to build just by writing code faster, it doesn’t solve the problems,” he says. “I don’t think our customers necessarily want code; they want features and functionality.”
The winners of the AI era won’t be the ones who write the most code, but the ones who build the most rigorous frameworks to manage its disposability.
As Cormack says: “Kiro’s now writing over a million lines of code for us every single month. So, before we start any new piece of work, our engineering team chooses Kiro to help understand exactly what it is that we want to build.
“The rigour at the start of this process helps enable the precision we want in our engineering at the end. So, every piece of work that we do starts with a spec, understanding the intent of what it is that we’re building and why.”
The 5G mobile market is moving beyond its initial land-grab phase and into a period shaped more by network quality, architectural maturity and service differentiation, according to a study from the Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA).
The State of the market report – from the industry association representing companies in the global mobile ecosystem engaged in the supply of infrastructure, semiconductors, test equipment, devices, applications and support services – was based on market data taken up until the end of March 2026.
Among the key findings of the research was the underlying dynamic that global 5G expansion is still advancing, but the story is no longer just about adding more launches to the map, and the more meaningful story is how it is broadening.
It reported that 392 operators have now launched 5G networks, up 14% from March 2025, reflecting 44% of total LTE and 5G networks. Spectrum was found to remain as the essential enabler of the next phase of 5G growth, and beyond that, 6G.
Indeed, the study showed that over the past year, 11 5G auctions have been completed across the world, for an average price of $663.4m. And as of the end of March 2026, there were 4,256 announced 5G devices in the market, up 24% from last year. In comparison, total LTE devices totalled 29,024.
5G Standalone was becoming the clearest marker of market maturity. Some 95 operators had launched a 5G Standalone service, highlighting a growth of 42% since the first quarter of 2025. Development of 5G Advanced networks was seen to still be at an early stage, but the GSA stressed that its growth rate makes it one of the clearest signals of where the market is heading next. In total, 35 operators are investing in 5G Advanced, an increase of 71% since 2025. Of these operators and providers, 11 have launched a service.
Looking at one of the key use cases of 5G networks, one the industry has long held to offer future prosperity, the study found that private mobile networks continue to demonstrate that 5G’s opportunity extends well beyond public consumer services. The manufacturing vertical is a strong adopter of mobile private networks, with 374 identified customer deployments, followed by the education and academic research sector, with 169 customers deploying it.
Yet despite the prospects from private 5G, the GSA’s report identified Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) as one of 5G’s strongest and most visible commercial success stories. The study found 394 operators who have launched a 5G fixed wireless service, with another 29 investing in the technology, an increase of 59% since June 2025.
The report also tracked the rapid growth of satellite-enabled mobile connectivity, which it said is moving from experiment to early commercial reality. Some 97 operators are investing in satellite-to-cell phone connectivity, and eight available chipsets are compatible with the technology.
Commenting on the study’s findings, Joe Barrett, president of the GSA, said: “The global 5G market is entering a more selective and strategic phase of development … This shift is most clearly visible in 5G Standalone, which now underpins much of the industry’s next wave of innovation, including 5G RedCap, network slicing and more advanced enterprise offers … These trends all point to a market that is no longer defined simply by how many 5G networks exist, but by what those networks are becoming.
“5G in 2026 will be shaped by standalone adoption, ecosystem readiness and the ability of operators to translate technical capability into commercial value.”
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