Have you ever asked an AI agent to perform a complex multi-step task, only to find it skipped a critical step halfway through? You're not alone.

Research shows that LLMs struggle with "lost in the middle" failures—forgetting tasks buried in long contexts. When your agent juggles file edits, test execution, and documentation updates, important steps can silently disappear. One solution, inspired by Claude Code, is to make planning explicit and observable with the help of a dedicated TodoWrite tool. The result: agents that never skip steps and workflows you can observe in real-time.

This is Part 3 of our Spring AI Agentic Patterns series. We've covered Agent Skills for modular capabilities and AskUserQuestionTool for interactive workflows. Now we explore how TodoWriteTool…

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's already the 20th of January and we are off on yet another rip roarin' adventure as we look at the week that has been... this week in Spring!

• even more good stuff from Spring AI team legend Christian Tsolov, this one on Spring AI agentic patterns (part 2!): AskUserQuestionTool. This blog is about agents that clarify before acting
• Spring Security 7.1.0M1 is available now
• Spring Data 2025.1.2 and 2025.0.8 released
• Spring Framework 7.0.3 is available now
• in last week's installment of A Bootiful Podcast, I talked to everyone's favorite observability otter, Jonatan Ivanov, about Micrometer and observability and all the things
• looks interesting - a video on Spring AI integrations with Geminni AI and Github CoPilot
• another interesting post on …

Traditional AI interactions follow a common pattern: you provide a prompt, the AI makes assumptions, and produces a response. When those assumptions don't match your needs, you're left iterating through corrections. Each assumption creates rework—wasting time and context.

What if your AI agent could ask you clarifying questions before providing answers?

The AskUserQuestionTool addresses this. It allows the AI agent to ask clarifying questions before answering, gathers requirements interactively, and creates a specification aligned with your actual needs from the start.

Spring AI's…

Hi, Spring fans! This week we catch up with the observably awesome Jonatan Ivanov on how to measure all the things with Micrometer

Hi, Spring fans, and welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! It's the 13th of January, 2026, and it's been quite the week indeed! Let's dive right into it!

• Nobody, and I mean nobody, asked. So I put together a video on how to use Spring WS to build SOAP-based services in 2026. Hey, SOAP may be legacy but the legacy endures in a lot of places and there's no reason you can't modernize those systems and services to use Spring Boot 4, GraalVM, and OAuth, as I show in this video.
• In last week's installment of A Bootiful Podcast, I talked to Spring Security lead Rob Winch on Spring Security 7
• Spring gRPC 1.0.1 is available now
• I love this blog from Embabel creator Rod Johnson: RAG pipelines are the past, agentic is the future
• I know this doesn't have anything to do with Spring, per se, but I find it …

Agent Skills are modular folders of instructions, scripts, and resources that AI agents can discover and load on demand. Instead of hardcoding knowledge into prompts or creating specialized tools for every task, skills provide a flexible way to extend agent capabilities.

Spring AI's implementation brings Agent Skills to the Java ecosystem, ensuring LLM portability—define your skills once and use them with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, or any other supported model.

This is the first post in our Spring AI Agentic Patterns series. This series explores the spring-ai-agent-utils toolkit—an extensive set of agentic patterns for Spring AI, inspired by Claude Code. We'll cover Agent Skills (this post), followed by Task Management, AskUserQuestion for interactive…

Hi, Spring fans! In this installment, I have the privilege of sitting down and talking to the legendary Rob Winch, lead of Spring Security, Spring Session, and the amazing Testjars project.

Hi, Spring fans, to the first installment of This Week in Spring in the new year and, roughly, the fifteenth anniversary edition of this series! I've been writing these blogs since the first week of January of 2011, and I am proud to say that I haven't (so far) missed a single week! I've always published it on Tuesday (with some fuzziness around whose Tuesday, as I tend to bounce around the globe a fair bit). I want to thank, as I always do, Spring cofounder Keith Donald for this wonderful and simple idea. He dropped it in my lap and said to give it a shot, and I've never looked back. He's no…

In this episode, I talk with Mark Thomas, the legendary and highly prolific committer to Apache Tomcat. Happy New Year!