Your Agent Passed Every Test. So Why Was It Still Wrong?

A coding agent built a working API endpoint in two hours. The code looked right. Every test passed.

Except the endpoint returned deleted users that weren't supposed to be there. The agent had made an assumption nobody asked it to make, then written tests that treated that assumption as correct.

For Lex Vorona, Atono co-founder and senior software developer, it's a familiar problem: agents can make perfectly reasonable decisions that are completely wrong for your product.

Lex shares what he's learned from working with coding agents, including:

• Why passing tests doesn't always mean an agent built the right thing

• How he decides when to supervise agents and when to let them work independently

• Why visibility into an agent's decisions matters as autonomy increases

• What he's learned about giving agents the context they need to succeed

Read The Story

Becoming A Better Writer

— Gergely Orosz

tl;dr: “Writing is an increasingly important skill for engineering leaders. Poor writing can hamper career progression, above a certain level. Tactics for more clear, more frequent and more confident writing.”

Leadership Career Writing

How To Sequence Annual Planning And Reorgs

— Yue Zhao

tl;dr: “A planning team is formed for each important area of investment for the next year. Each team has a planning lead and includes critical members from each function that needs to be involved in the planning (e.g., marketing, sales, customer support, operations, finance, engineering, design). This team meets according to the planning cycle, coming together for brainstorming sessions, prioritization, resource planning, and executive reviews.”

Leadership CareerDesign

Your Agent Knows Your Code. But Does It Know Your Product?

tl;dr: Better prompts won't solve every agent problem. Your agent might understand the codebase but still miss the product decisions behind it. We break down three ways to give Cursor and Claude Code the context they need: repo-level instructions, connected documentation, and context tied directly to the work, including where each approach falls short.

Promoted by Atono

Guide AI Agents

Fast And Slow Ways To Improve Your Reputation

— Sean Goedecke

tl;dr: “To get a good reputation in tech companies, you need to work on important projects. However, you need a good reputation first in order to get assigned important projects. Doesn’t that make it impossible to get started?”

Career

"Write a short story a week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row." — Ray Bradbury

Hunger Beats Tenure: Advice For Junior Engineers

— Felix Rieseberg

tl;dr: “This month, I laid the traditional coding interview to rest. As a hiring manager at Anthropic, I stopped asking candidates to do them. It had a good run: Being able to quickly define problems and find elegant solutions was a weak but useful predictor for how successful you’d be on my teams.”

Management Hiring Career

Every Model. Privacy With Proof.

tl;dr: TrustedRouter gives you hundreds of AI models through one open source, OpenAI-compatible API. Find the right model at the right price, with automatic provider fallback to keep your app running. TrustedRouter’s attested gateway never logs your prompts or outputs, and you can verify its attestation yourself. Already using OpenRouter? Change your base URL and API key. Try it today with free credits at TrustedRouter.

Promoted by TrustedRouter

Security API AI

Self-Reinforcing Quality / Adopting Verification Pattern

— Will Larson

tl;dr: “You can argue that your harness was already performing these steps, but it’s actually hard to say whether it was or wasn’t. My sense is that it often wasn’t happening: I’ve seen too many pull requests go to CICD that had failed basic lints that could have been run locally to believe the harness was always running them. Now the harness has to explicitly document that it’s done those steps, or acknowledge it hasn’t. This allows the harness to self-drive more effectively.”

DevEx CodeQuality

How DoorDash Reduced LLM Search Costs By 98% Without Losing Accuracy

tl;dr: “Reasoning models and evidence retrieval evolve at different speeds. Separating them lets us improve either independently and choose the balance of quality, freshness, latency, and cost that each workload needs. For DoorDash’s QIU workload, that separation preserved accuracy while substantially lowering search costs. The broader engineering lesson is to make grounding an explicit interface that teams can evaluate and change as their requirements evolve.”

CaseStudy CostOptimization AI

The Skill Of Using AI Agents Well

tl;dr: “What tips, tricks, approaches are you using to improve your efficiency when using agent harnesses? I personally focus on Claude Code & Codex CLI mostly for single person software development, but I welcome suggestions for other tools and other areas of use. Ideally you share what you tried and what works for you and I try it myself and see whether it improves my workflow. Here are my discoveries (with level of confidence).”

Tips AI Agents

Most Popular From Last Issue

Why We Sabotage Our Careers - John Cutler

Notable Links

Agent Desktop: Computer use for agents.

Craft Anything: Understand how any software works, and craft your own.

Kronos: Model for the language of financial markets.

OpenMausBot: OS Grok bot alternative.

Univer: Office harness for agents.

Every Shopify Store Is Now Agent-Ready By Default

Shopify's Fall '26 Edition adds WebMCP tools to every Liquid and Hydrogen storefront and checkout, so agents get structured data to search, build carts, and check out after the buyer approves.

And shop.dev gives your team one keyless integration to 1B+ products and Shop Pay.

Check Out What’s New

You Can’t Find 10x Developers, But You Can Build 10x Organizations

— Scott Carey, Justin Reock

tl;dr: “More than 600 developers across almost 100 companies were asked to perform the same business task using code in their normal workflow, and asked to measure the time it took to complete the task, as well as defect rates. The spread between the fastest and slowest performers was 11.1x, and that single number contributed to the 10x developer myth.”

Leadership OrgDesign DevEx

Why We Sabotage Our Careers

— John Cutler

tl;dr: “That got me thinking about how people (myself included) “self-sabotage” at work. The brain fog has made it hard to write a real piece, but I managed to pull together these thought fragments.”

Career Wellbeing

Every Shopify Store Is Now Agent-Ready By Default

tl;dr: Shopify's Fall '26 Edition adds WebMCP tools to every Liquid and Hydrogen storefront and checkout, so agents get structured data to search, build carts, and check out after the buyer approves. And shop.dev gives your team one keyless integration to 1B+ products and Shop Pay.

Promoted by Shopify

AI Agents

Supervisory Engineering Work

— Annie Vella

tl;dr: “In this post, I’ll make the case that supervisory engineering work is a new form of a much older concept - supervisory control - one that’s been studied for decades and can tell us a lot about what this kind of job means for the people doing it.”

Leadership Management IndustryTrends

People buy into the leader before they buy into the vision.” – John C. Maxwell

Eight Things That Are Negotiable When You Start a New Job (That Nobody Tells You To Ask For)

— Louise Deason

tl;dr: “Salary is the one line on the offer everyone knows to fight about, which is precisely why it’s the one line they’ve already padded to expect a fight. The other eight things on that offer are the ones nobody coached you on, the ones HR is quietly hoping you’ll sign without reading, and the ones that are - every single one of them - negotiable.”

Tips Career Negotiation

What 1,676 AI Code Reviews Cost Us In One Month

tl;dr: In one month, Upsun Dispatch agents reviewed 1,676 merge requests for our own engineering team. Total cost: about $470. That's roughly one day of a senior engineer, who'd get through 30 to 40. Every merge request got a first review in minutes, and our seniors kept their time for the risky changes. A human still approves every merge. Start with 20 free agent minutes a day.

Promoted by Upsun

CaseStudy CodeReview AI

How Claude Code Works In Large Codebases: Best Practices And Where To Start

tl;dr: “This article covers the patterns we've observed that have led to successful adoption of Claude Code at scale. We use “large codebase” to refer to a wide range of deployments: monorepos with millions of lines, legacy systems built over decades, dozens of microservices across separate repositories, or any combination of the above.“

Guide DevEx AI

Self-Improving Software Is Inevitable

— Boris Tane

tl;dr: “Applications that read their own signals, decide what to change, ship the change, and check whether it worked. And once software can improve itself, it can improve the machinery that improves it: better observability, sharper detection, deeper investigations, better fixes, each loop tightening the next one.”

IndustryTrends Agents AI

This Is Not Sustainable

— Jan Schaumann

tl;dr: “The current situation is not sustainable: 0-days are dropping left and right, pre-notifications and embargoes are broken for marketing purposes, AI companies compete first on who commits the most crimes and then pretend to sell you protection in the form of a DoS on the Open Source community. "Nice project you got there. Be a shame if somebody dropped an 0-day on it.””

IndustryTrends OpenSource Security

Most Popular From Last Issue

Seven Phrases I Stole From Staff Engineers - Louise Deason

Notable Links

AI Job Search: Job application framework built on Claude.

Bend: Fast language that blocks AI mistakes.

Impeccable: Design vocab for your coding agent.

Superplane: OS factory for one-shot engineering.

Taste Skill: OS skill files that give agents taste.

The Context Layer For Agentic Software Development

Your agents know the code. Give them the rest of your organizational context.

Unblocked reasons across your code, conversations, issues, docs, and production systems so agents can complete work correctly with less human intervention.

Try For Free Today

Seven Phrases I Stole From Staff Engineers

— Louise Deason

tl;dr: “I have spent the last several years collecting these phrases the way other people collect house plants. I steal them. I write them down. I try them out in my own meetings, badly at first, and then with increasing precision until they start to work. Below are seven I now use constantly, with the underlying move each one is actually doing - because the phrase is the surface; the move is the thing.”

Leadership Communication Staff+

When You Disagree With A Decision

— Michael Heap

tl;dr: “By pairing strong commitment with deep empathy, you respect both the decision-making process and the people executing it. Own the direction, do the work as if you were solely responsible for its success, and keep your eyes open for the genuine friction that proves it’s time to talk again.”

Management DifficultConversations

[Webinar] How To Stop Babysitting Your Agents

— Brandon Waselnuk

tl;dr: You write the rules files, maintain the skills, and paste in the Slack thread your agent missed. But hand-curated context goes stale, and when the sources disagree, your agent can’t tell which is right. Join us live on Oct 28 (FREE) to see how a context engine helps agents get it right the first time.

Promoted by Unblocked

Events AI Agents

The Arrival Trap

— Mike Fisher

tl;dr: “The arrival trap costs the most in abandoned compounding. Somewhere right now, a 33-year-old with a decade of hard-won judgment is deciding the window has closed, while the data says they are still twelve years younger than the average founder of a top-performing company. Somewhere a team is killing a sound strategy in year two because someone sold it as a year-one story. The trap pushes a few people to fake success. It pushes far more to quit real success in progress because it’s arriving on an unfashionable schedule.”

Leadership Strategy Career

"Teach for the future; you have to live in it" — Bjarne Stroustrup

How The Claude Code Team Does Code Review

— Qing Wang, Morgan Westlee Lunt, Addy Osmani

tl;dr: “How do you review code at the volume agents produce it? On the Claude Code team, once we had high coverage and deep reviews, we started optimizing for the minimum amount of human review time that doesn't raise reverts or incidents.”

CodeReview AI Agents

Five Things To Look For In Engineers Now That AI Writes The Code

— Luka Biber

tl;dr: Ask an AI agent to add versioning to file uploads, and it might rewrite parts of your upload system that didn't need changing. Catching that is now the engineer's job. Here are the five things we look for in senior engineers in the age of AI.

Promoted by Remgu

Management AI Hiring

Someone Behind The Software

— Karri Saarinen

tl;dr: “I think good products carry something of the people who make them. Their experience, what they care about, and how they think things should work. You might not know who those people are, but you can feel their perspective in the product.”

Leadership Culture Product

You Have More Influence Over The Future Than You Think

— Sharif Shameem

tl;dr: “I’ve heard some say that AGI will make us more efficient at work. And that it really won’t have much of an impact on our personal lives. I find this belief to be common in people who lack creativity and cannot envision a future beyond automating knowledge work. If the future we’re barreling towards is not one of unbridled eudaimonia, then what are we really doing here?”

Leadership Influence AI

How I Manage My Agents

— Fatih Arslan

tl;dr: “There are probably hundreds of posts like this. But I wanted to share my workflow about how I create and manage a fleet of agents. I've had huge success with it over the past few months.”

Guide AI Agents

Most Popular From Last Issue

Elephants, Goldfish And The New Golden Age Of Software Engineering - Dave Resin

Notable Links

Claude SEO: Free OS SEO audits inside Claude.

DeepTeam: LLM red teaming framework.

DeepTutor: OS learning companion that grows with you.

ECC: Harness performance optimization system.

Elephant-Goldfish Model: OS plugin for spec-driven development with agents.

The Developer’s Guide To SSO

The first enterprise deal usually comes with an SSO requirement and a deadline. Then someone on your team learns SAML the hard way: XML assertions, x509 certificates, and a different quirk for every identity provider.

WorkOS puts them all behind one integration. The developer’s guide covers a full SAML flow, the build-versus-buy tradeoffs, and the routing and UX details that trip teams up.

Read The Guide →

Elephants, Goldfish And The New Golden Age Of Software Engineering

— Dave Resin

tl;dr: “I argue that most of us are using our AI tools - including basic chatbots - wrong. I will propose a different approach that I hope will be valuable no matter who you are or what you do for a living. This section is for everyone and it sets up what follows.”

Management Productivity AI

AI Made Developers Faster. Is Their Judgment Keeping Up?

— Brian Houck, Scott Carey

tl;dr: “I’ve been sensing a real anxiety amongst developers over the past year or so around skill and knowledge atrophy. We know that AI tools like Cursor and Claude make developers faster – or at least feel faster – but at what cost? The team coined a new term: the hollow orchestrator. A developer can easily find themselves approving more work each month, without becoming better equipped to judge it.”

Management AI

The Developer’s Guide To SSO

tl;dr: The first enterprise deal usually comes with an SSO requirement and a deadline. Then someone on your team learns SAML the hard way: XML assertions, x509 certificates, and a different quirk for every identity provider. WorkOS puts them all behind one integration. The developer’s guide covers a full SAML flow, the build-versus-buy tradeoffs, and the routing and UX details that trip teams up.

Promoted by WorkOS

Guide Auth

On Managing Up

— James Samuel

tl;dr: “What direct report would you love to work with and why? What would they do that would make you love working with them? When we think through this lens, you can start to see what you can do to manage up.”

ManagingUp Career

"Followers who tell the truth, and leaders who listen to it, are an unbeatable combination." — Warren Bennis

The Git Commands I Run Before Reading Any Code

— Alex Piechowski

tl;dr: “The first thing I usually do when I pick up a new codebase isn’t opening the code. It’s opening a terminal and running a handful of git commands. Before I look at a single file, the commit history gives me a diagnostic picture of the project: who built it, where the problems cluster, whether the team is shipping with confidence or tiptoeing around land mines.”

KnowledgeManagement Git

Models Are Worse At Reviewing Their Own Code

— Rodrigo Caridad

tl;dr: Models are worse at finding bugs in their own code. We curated two datasets of 500 PRs each, one authored by Claude Code and one by Codex. Final results reflect recall on high-severity bugs only. In Claude Code authored PRs, GPT caught a higher share of high severity bugs than Opus. The opposite was true for Codex authored PRs - Opus beats GPT.

Promoted by Greptile

CaseStudy CodeReview AI

Agentic Monitoring

— Ben Congdon

tl;dr: “This is so obviously the path forward for software systems operations. I’ve been thinking about monitoring with agents for the past few weeks, and this paragraph crystallized some of those thoughts.”

AI Observability Agents

The Case Of The 500-Mile Email

— Trey Harris

tl;dr: "Here's a problem that sounded impossible... I almost regret posting the story to a wide audience, because it makes a great tale over drinks at a conference. The story is slightly altered in order to protect the guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make the whole thing more entertaining.”

Entertaining Debugging

How To Measure The Human Cost Of Agent Work

— Michael Cutler

tl;dr: “How much human effort and agent spend does this workflow consume per completed task, at an agreed quality bar? Proving it saves time against another method requires an additional comparison.”

Management Metrics Agents

Most Popular From Last Issue

How AI Has Changed My Engineering Leadership Role - Bjorn Roche

Notable Links

Graphify: Turn any codebase into a queryable knowledge graph.

iFixAI: Independent auditing of agents.

Ponytail: Your agent thinks like the senior dev in the room.

Stagehand: SDK for browser agents.

Video Skills: OS skills that let agents make video.

Know Your Engineering Performance. Stop Guessing

AI changed how software ships. Most engineering metrics didn't keep up. Larridin built the AI-native standard for engineering performance, measuring velocity, code quality, and production reliability.

• Engineering Output weighted by complexity and quality

• AI Output Share and AI Slop Index

• Code Durability and change failure rate

Measure Your Team’s Results

How AI Has Changed My Engineering Leadership Role

— Bjorn Roche

tl;dr: Bjorn offers the following: (1) Being more hands-on. (2) Onboarding is faster. (3) Less caution about dependencies and adopting new tech. (4) Bus factor is less of a concern.

Leadership AI

New Trend Of Building “Internal Vibe-Coding Apps” At Tech Companies

— Gergely Orosz

tl;dr: “Ramp and Stripe built platforms for non-engineers to build internal websites and tools with, and both are taking off in those workplaces. I expect more companies to do the same.”

IndustryTrends PlatformEngineering AI

Know Your Engineering Performance. Stop Guessing

tl;dr: AI changed how software ships. Most engineering metrics didn't keep up. Larridin built the AI-native standard for engineering performance, measuring velocity, code quality, and production reliability. (1) Engineering Output weighted by complexity and quality. (2) AI Output Share and AI Slop Index. (3) Code Durability and change failure rate.

Promoted by Larridin

Management Metrics AI

How Do I Give Feedback To Someone Who Thinks They Are Performing Well?

— Andi Roberts

tl;dr: “When someone believes they are performing well and you see evidence otherwise, you are often facing a perception gap rather than defensiveness. Start by understanding the gap, then surface your evidence with precision before inviting them to make sense of it alongside you. This reframes the conversation from “you are wrong about yourself” to “here is what I am seeing, what do you make of it?””

Management Feedback

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” — Aristotle

I Am Often Wrong

— Boris Cherny

tl;dr: "I shared this note with my team earlier this week, and am posting it here as well. I hope it is interesting or helpful for others working on building product in the age of AI."

Leadership DecisionMaking AI

8 Stages Of AI Engineering Maturity: Where's Your Team?

tl;dr: Does your team share agent workflows, approval rules, and guardrails, or is everyone improvising? Seven questions place your organization on an 8-stage AI-engineering maturity scale created by Fabien Potencier, creator of Symfony. In about three minutes you get your stage, a score on eight areas, and the one change that moves you forward fastest. Find out where your team really stands.

Promoted by Upsun

Management Metrics AI

Speeding Up Code Review With ‘small-change’

— Will Larson

tl;dr: “As we’ve walked this path, we–like everyone else progressing down it–have run into the problem of pull request review. The p50 pull request review took about 33 minutes to complete 2 years ago, but now takes us about 77 minutes. The slope here correlates tightly with the number of pull requests getting merged. Tightly enough that addressing it became one of my priorities for the week... I think our current approach is an interesting one, which we call the small-change.”

CaseStudy CodeReview

The Bedrock of Software Design

— Alex Fedoseev

tl;dr: “Nothing has influenced the way I design software more than algebraic data types. It sounds overly academic—the kind of term that makes people roll their eyes or scares them away altogether. But honestly, it only sounds scary. The idea itself is quite simple, and learning it showed me a fundamentally better way to build software.”

DeepDive CodeQuality Architecture

How D1 Scales To Millions Of Databases

— Lambros Petrou, David Laban

tl;dr: “The question becomes: how do you scale the control plane for millions of databases without making every query slower by sending it through centralized bottlenecks?”

Scale Database

Most Popular From Last Issue

The Brain Sandwich - Matheus Lima

Notable Links

AI Job Search: Job application framework built on Claude.

Filee: Free OS file converter.

Harness2: Framework for recursive agent harnessing.

Jasna: Video restoration tool.

Orca: The place for working with a fleet of agents.

CI Is Dead. Long Live CI.

Everyone's talking about the bottleneck shifting... our customers just want something stable as they scale, with actually good DX, that gets out of the way.

Buildkite is the pro-tool for CI orchestration, and when you're setup, you can forget we exist.

Programmable primitives you control. No compromises. Good enough for Cursor, OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Nvidia, Uber, Airbnb and more.

Build and test faster, more securely, more reliably, with the CI engineered for frontier scale, used by the teams setting the pace.

You deserve better CI.

Start With Our 30 Day Trial →

Put A Name On It

— James Stanier

tl;dr: “As the industry has changed, our organisations have flattened. Leadership is closer to the details, and someone has to own the outcome, talk to stakeholders, and get the work done without management needing to be part of every decision. The simplest answer I know is named ownership: one person per project, by name, visible to everyone. We’ve been leaning into that for the past year, and I’d like to explore why I think it’s a very good idea.”

Leadership OrgDesign Management

Management In The Age Of AI

tl;dr: “Management is becoming more important as AI changes how businesses work, and the job itself is shifting faster than most managers have noticed. Let’s talk about what’s changing and how to deal with it.”

Management AI IndustryTrends

CI Is Dead. Long Live CI.

tl;dr: Everyone's talking about the bottleneck shifting... our customers just want something stable as they scale, with actually good DX, that gets out of the way. Buildkite is the pro-tool for CI orchestration, and when you're setup, you can forget we exist. Programmable primitives you control. No compromises. Good enough for Cursor, OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Nvidia, Uber, Airbnb and more. Build and test faster, more securely, more reliably, with the CI engineered for frontier scale, used by the teams setting the pace. You deserve better CI.

Promoted by Buildkite

Infrastructure AI

The Art Of Showing Up

— Steve Huynh

tl;dr: “The biggest enemy of presence is our obsession with the finish line. We fixate on the feeling of relief we’ll have when the task is over. This makes the present feel like an obstacle, and it creates in us a desperate urge to escape.”

Productivity Wellbeing

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” — Pablo Picasso

The Brain Sandwich

— Matheus Lima

tl;dr: “The reason I decided to post about this is that Emily has a very simple framework that she uses for working with AI, which she calls the “Brain Sandwich”, that solves this. It’s both about taking full advantage of AI without letting your engineering skills atrophy.”

Career Learning AI

Get More From Your Team’s AI Investment

tl;dr: Give your teams clear priorities for improving AI results. Span evaluates coding agent sessions for 1) prompt clarity, 2) environment readiness, and 3) quality stewardship, then connects those scores to delivery, cost, and rework. See where teams need support, spread effective practices, and show your CEO progress backed by evidence. Engineering leaders at Ramp and Duolingo trust Span to measure and optimize their AI software factory.

Promoted by Span

Management Metrics AI

How To Be More Ambitious: A Tutorial For Humans With Models

— Felix Rieseberg

tl;dr: “I frequently proclaim (together with other people working on AI) that we ought to be more ambitious when using it. It’s become a rallying cry. Whenever we see something impressive, we repost and write “we’re not ambitious enough”. I understand how tricky it is to follow that advice, so here’s a tutorial on being more ambitious. I think of ambition in four types: Speed, Altitude, Depth, and Range.”

Guide Productivity AI

Are Harnesses Worth The Cost?

— Naresh Jain

tl;dr: “I went into this experiment expecting a behavioral harness to help a coding agent meet the requirements more reliably, save tokens and prevent wasted work. Giving an agent clear architectural contracts and deterministic test feedback while it coded seemed like an obvious way to help it get the implementation right on the first pass. The results flatly contradicted that expectation and surprised me.”

CaseStudy AI Agents

Beyond Synthetic Testing: Capturing And Replaying Real Database Workloads

— Zuofei Wang, Erluo Li

tl;dr: “At Airbnb, MySQL-compatible databases are a critical backbone of our online database infrastructure: a fleet of hundreds of clusters supporting thousands of use cases at millions of queries per second (QPS). Operating databases at scale brings hard problems, including sizing clusters for future growth, keeping behavior consistent across version upgrades and migrations, and reproducing production incidents well enough to debug them. This post describes the database traffic capture and replay system we built to help us tackle them.”

CaseStudy Scale Database

Most Popular From Last Issue

Why Your Engineering Team Is Slow - Alex Piechowski

Notable Links

Bend: Fast language that blocks AI mistakes.

Floci: AWS local emulator alternative.

Liteparse: OS document parser.

Plannotator: Review surface for agents.

REA: Reverse engineer anything with agents.

The Context Layer For Agentic Software Development

Your agents know the code. Give them the rest of your organizational context.

Unblocked reasons across your code, conversations, issues, docs, and production systems so agents can complete work correctly with less human intervention.

Try For Free Today

Why Your Engineering Team Is Slow

— Alex Piechowski

tl;dr: “After years of codebase audits, the same five signals keep showing up, so I finally put them into a scoring rubric: The Codebase Drag Audit. Five signals, scored 0 to 2. If you hit 4 or above, the code needs direct investment before anything else will help.”

Management CodeQuality TechDebt

“You Didn’t Do It Right”

— Jason Cohen

tl;dr: “Four sincere attempts at OKRs, four failures, and every time: “you didn’t do it right.” Maybe the framework doesn’t fit you — so how do you find one that does?”

Management GoalSetting

[Webinar] How To Stop Rewriting Your Agent’s Code

— Brandon Waselnuk

tl;dr: You write the rules files, maintain the skills, and paste in the Slack thread your agent missed. But hand-curated context goes stale, and when the sources disagree, your agent can’t tell which is right. Join us live on Oct 28 (FREE) to see how a context engine helps agents get it right the first time.

Promoted by Unblocked

Event AI Agents

I Don't Want The Details

— Michael Heap

tl;dr: "At first I thought ""I don't want the details"" sounded dismissive. How can they make informed decisions without understanding the details? Then I realised that ""I don't want the details"" wasn't being dismissive. The executive assumed that we were competent, and was saying ""I already believe you. Now let's talk about what happens next”.

Leadership Communication

“It is not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It is the manager’s job to make it safe to take them.” — Ed Catmull

Don't Diagnose Your Opponents

— Sean Goedecke

tl;dr: “When you disagree with someone, there are two paths forward. The first is to try to engage with what they’re saying: what their reasons are, whether their position is true, what evidence could be brought to bear, and so on. The second is to diagnose them: to engage with the second-order question of why they’re saying it.”

Leadership Communication

How Do You Evaluate A Senior Engineer In The Age Of AI?

tl;dr: When AI can accelerate execution, traditional signals of seniority don’t tell the whole story. This 30-point checklist gives engineering leaders a practical framework to score senior-level readiness. It includes a ready-to-use interview questionnaire, so you can see if your hiring criteria have kept up.

Promoted by Assuresoft

Guide Hiring AI

How To Effectively Debug When You No Longer Understand The Code

— Cindy Sridharan

tl;dr: “I consider this an emergent skillset that’s different from coding or traditional debugging, but like any other skill, it’s one that can be honed with enough effort. While I’m no leading expert in this area, the general contours of how these skills can be actively cultivated are beginning to stand out in sharp relief. By putting my own experiences in writing, I’m hoping to hear from fellow practitioners their thoughts on this topic.”

CodeQuality Debugging

38 Things We've Learned About Building AI Products

— Ian Vanagas

tl;dr: “We’ve built 10 different AI products at PostHog, including PostHog AI, our install Wizard, Replay Vision, Scouts, and more. They’re used by nearly 100,000 people every month. This is what we’ve learned.”

CaseStudy AI Product

Grieving The Loss Of Details

— Alisa Sireneva

tl;dr: “I’ve been thinking about where I stand in respect to the current state of the industry. This is more of a journal note than a post, apologies for that. I usually leave this stuff private, but I thought I’d post this as a trial in case someone relates to this experience and feels less alone.”

Career IndustryTrends

Most Popular From Last Issue

The State Of The Tech Industry In 2026 - Gergely Orosz

Notable Links

Anatomy: Claude skill that explains an idea by building it.

Artcraft: Capable Tools For Artists

Mobile Next: MCP server for mobile dev.

Treg: OpenRouter For Agent Tools

Video-Shotcraft: AI video skill for Claude Code & Codex.

Know Your Engineering Performance. Stop Guessing

AI changed how software ships. Most engineering metrics didn't keep up. Larridin built the AI-native standard for engineering performance, measuring velocity, code quality, and production reliability.

• Engineering Output weighted by complexity and quality

• AI Output Share and AI Slop Index

• Code Durability and change failure rate

Measure Your Team’s Results

The State Of The Tech Industry In 2026

— Gergely Orosz

tl;dr: “I spent weeks identifying and recording trends that didn’t exist a year ago – or were much more nascent back then – and also things that are currently broken, and others that remain unchanged. Today, we cover: (1) Speed of change. (2) What’s changed. (3) What’s broken. (4) What’s still the same. (5) What comes next?”

Leadership Management IndustryTrends

The Missing Instructor

— Mike Fisher

tl;dr: “Two people, who did not collaborate, built the same tool within a few months. I take that as a sign that the economics changed underneath both of them. The cost of a competent observer collapsed.” Mike discusses how managers can evolve through feedback like never before.

Management Feedback AI

Know Your Engineering Performance. Stop Guessing

tl;dr: AI changed how software ships. Most engineering metrics didn't keep up. Larridin built the AI-native standard for engineering performance, measuring velocity, code quality, and production reliability. (1) Engineering Output weighted by complexity and quality. (2) AI Output Share and AI Slop Index. (3) Code Durability and change failure rate.

Promoted by Larridin

DevEx AI Security

Influence Without Authority

— Gabriel Valdivia

tl;dr: “Individual contributors can develop influence by giving people reasons to trust their judgment, then finding ways for that judgment to travel beyond the things they personally make.”

Leadership Influence Staff+

"Everyone admires the bold; no one admires the timid." — Robert Greene

How To Read Code

— Sean Goedecke

tl;dr: “Reading code in a large program is thus a process of compromise: of deciding which parts to thoroughly grasp and which parts to gloss over; or of portioning out your finite mental capacity across the codebase.”

Career Learning CodeQuality

How To Hire Engineers When AI Makes Everyone’s Code Look Good

— Luka Biber

tl;dr: Everyone’s code looks good now. The engineers who matter are the ones who know why it works, and can tell when it doesn’t. Now more than ever, hiring comes down to finding people who understand the why behind what they built and why it was the best solution. Here’s how to find them.

Promoted by Remgu

Management Hiring AI

Anti-Patterns In Software Blogging

— Michael Lynch

tl;dr: "In software development, we collect anti-patterns to recognize common traits that lead to poor outcomes in our software. I thought it would be helpful to do the same for software blogging, so I’ve catalogued the most frequent mistakes I see from beginner bloggers.”

Writing Tips

Building an Internal Company Agent: 5 Things We Got Right And 5 I Would Do Differently

— Orestis Ioannou

tl;dr: “This is not a universal guide to building agents. It is a practical retrospective from building one inside a real company: five things we got right and five I would approach differently today.”

CaseStudy AI Agents

Developer Survey 2026

tl;dr: “For the sixteenth year, we’ve asked developers and technologists about everything from how they’re using AI to how happy they are at work to where they’re learning new skills. This year’s survey boils down to one question: How are you doing?”

AI Survey IndustryTrends

Most Popular From Last Issue

How I Have Time For Everything - Steve Huynh

Notable Links

Destroy Any Website: Type an address, break everything.

Jevgrep: Find code by asking what it does.

MicroLLM Lab: Run, benchmark, and compare SLMs in the browser.

Size Limit: Performance budget tool for JS.

Whiteboard: OS canvas for software design.

Fake Signups Are An Inference Bill

Every fake account on your free tier burns real credits. Abusers rotate emails and devices faster than any blocklist can track, so your team ends up maintaining rules instead of shipping.

WorkOS Radar scores each signup on device, email, and network signals. Block the obvious abuse, challenge the suspicious, and see the evidence behind every decision.

Stop Free-Tier Abuse →

The Manager’s Path In The Age Of AI

— Camille Fournier

tl;dr: “This talk forced me to boil the book down to a few recurring themes of focus areas for managers; namely, Technical Skills, Signal Processing, and People Skills. What are these things and how have they started changing with the current state of AI?”

Leadership Management AI

How Can I Make Better Decisions When Facing Uncertainty?

— Andi Roberts

tl;dr: Better decisions under uncertainty start with better sensemaking. The risk is often not a lack of information, but settling too quickly on one explanation of what is happening. Three trialectics from Dave Snowden’s work can help leaders examine how they perceive, know, and reason before deciding how to act.

Leadership Management DecisionMaking

Fake Signups Are An Inference Bill

tl;dr: Every fake account on your free tier burns real credits. Abusers rotate emails and devices faster than any blocklist can track, so your team ends up maintaining rules instead of shipping. WorkOS Radar scores each signup on device, email, and network signals. Block the obvious abuse, challenge the suspicious, and see the evidence behind every decision.

Promoted by WorkOS

DevEx AI Security

How I Have Time For Everything

— Steve Huynh

tl;dr: “I’m a recovering productivity junkie. I’ve learned there isn’t a secret method that unlocks more hours in the day, and that most of what we call “time management” or “productivity systems” is a trap. The solution isn’t a new app or a more complex scheduling system.”

Productivity Wellbeing

“Stories are the single most powerful weapon in a leader’s arsenal” — Howard Gardner

Reducing The Cognitive Load Of AI Changes

— Andrew Moffat

tl;dr: “When reviewing large amounts of AI-generated code, I often find that the LLM chooses terms for abstractions that do not always map to my own choices.” Andrew shares his approach.

CodeReview AI DevEx

OpenAPPA - The First Open-Source Deterministic Guardrails That Don't Break Agents

tl;dr: Recently, Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic have each disclosed AI security incidents, making "guardrails" a new buzzword. OpenAPPA provides deterministic guardrails that are 100% resistant to data exfiltration caused by prompt injection or model hallucination and are the first of their kind that don't break agents. It sits between an AI agent and its tools, checks tool calls against security rules, and can sanitize data or run parts of a task in isolation so the agent can keep working safely.

Promoted by Archestra

OpenSource Agents Security

Two-Way Doors: Don’t Code Yourself Into A Corner

— Christopher Kennelly, Nimit Khandelwal

tl;dr: “Unless designing for flexibility, even trivial choices can quickly harden into painful one-way doors. To maintain high decision velocity safely, use deliberate architectural patterns to engineer reversibility into your code. Instead of coding yourself into a corner, actively design your code with built-in escape hatches. By consciously building flexibility into your systems up front, you can eliminate analysis paralysis and keep your team executing both fast and safely.”

TechDebt DecisionMaking Architecture

Everything You’ve Been Told About Burnout Is Wrong

— Blake Scholl

tl;dr: “Burnout is not what it presents: it’s not about working too hard for too long, burnout is about working in the face of a goal that seems too far out, too unattainable, too abstract.”

Management Wellbeing

Language Models for Text Classification: From Bag-of-Words To Jev

— Sebastian Raschka

tl;dr: While Jev aims to classify things, it’s easy to dismiss Jev as “just a classifier,” and my own view of Jev has evolved quite a bit over the past few days. In particular, my thoughts went from “classifiers used to be my bread & butter; I can easily build this myself” to “wow, this actually works better than I thought.”

Tools+Setup ML AI

Editorial

Two Builders on the Future of Engineering Management

Last month I sat in on a public conversation between Gergely Orosz and Michael Grinich of WorkOS about what AI is doing to engineering management. Five things stuck:

Roles are redrawing. Leaders are back in the code with agents, engineers are making more product calls, yet WorkOS hired more PMs due to work volume.The bottleneck moved downstream. More PRs means CI / CD strain and review that doesn't scale. Raise output without redesigning review and you've shifted the bottleneck.Engineering's remit is expanding to enabling everyone to build. Non-engineers are shipping internal agents and prototypes on engineering platforms.Your own learning environment is a career issue. Leaders are leaving AI-resistant orgs; some are building their own companies and others taking smaller roles to experience hands back on.Reliability might become the dividing line between fast and effective. Higher change volume means more ways to break prod. Reliability is becoming a bigger concern with the increased speed and scale.

AI isn't eliminating engineering management. It's changing what you have to be hands-on. Less coordinating the work, more designing the systems and teams that can absorb the output.

Most Popular From Last Issue

10 Career Traps (Thoughtful People Fall Into) - John Cutler

Notable Links

Laya: System 1 decision engine.

Livenerf: Benchmark for tracking model capability.

PhotoCraft: OS reimplementation of Photoshop.

REA: Reverse engineer anything with agents.

Router: Model router for agentic systems.

Know Your Engineering Performance. Stop Guessing

AI changed how software ships. Most engineering metrics didn't keep up. Larridin built the AI-native standard for engineering performance, measuring velocity, code quality, and production reliability.

• Engineering Output weighted by complexity and quality

• AI Output Share and AI Slop Index

• Code Durability and change failure rate

Measure Your Team’s Results

I’m An Introvert. This Is How I Get Myself To Speak Up.

— Wes Kao

tl;dr: “Prepare go-to phrases to insert yourself in meetings, ask a colleague to keep you accountable, and other tactics I personally use to get myself to speak up.”

Career Communication

10 Career Traps (Thoughtful People Fall Into)

— John Cutler

tl;dr: “Every trap below begins with a strength or virtue. Curiosity. Empathy. Courage. Helpfulness. Sensitivity. Intellectual honesty. A willingness to question. A desire to make things better. The ability to see patterns other people miss.”

Career

Know Your Engineering Performance. Stop Guessing

tl;dr: AI changed how software ships. Most engineering metrics didn't keep up. Larridin built the AI-native standard for engineering performance, measuring velocity, code quality, and production reliability. (1) Engineering Output weighted by complexity and quality. (2) AI Output Share and AI Slop Index. (3) Code Durability and change failure rate.

Promoted by Larradin

DevEx AI Metrics

A Staff Engineer's Guide to Inventing Work

— Sujith Jay Nair

tl;dr: “A big part of a staff engineer’s job in a platform team is to figure out what the team should build next - I like to call that “inventing work”. Thankfully, the signals that help us to invent work are already out there, and they arrive from four directions - from the systems, from the users, from your organization, and from the industry. What follows is a guide to reading each of them.”

Strategy PlatformEngineering Staff+

“Lead from the back - and let others believe they are in front.” — Nelson Mandela

How Do AI Coding Assistants Change The Shape Of Engineering Work Over Time?

— Lizzie Matusov

tl;dr: “Researchers at the University of Auckland surveyed professional software engineers who were very actively using using AI coding assistants during two time windows (October 2024 and April 2025). Each survey asked about time spent on six development tasks, perceived productivity, and the three DevEx dimensions, alongside open-ended questions about how the tools had changed their work.”

Leadership AI DevEx

The All-In-One Open-Source Enterprise AI Platform

tl;dr: Archestra brings an LLM gateway, MCP infrastructure, agent runtime, chat, and knowledge bases into one open-source platform. Authentication, security, observability, and cost controls are built in and shared across the stack. Self-host it and let teams keep using Claude Code, Cursor, and their own agents. Built-in OpenAPPA adds deterministic guardrails that can sanitize data or isolate parts of a task so agents can keep working safely.

Promoted by Archestra

Infrastructure Agents AI

Hiring Breakpoints

tl;dr: “And there are a few important breakpoints to consider on the journey of growing your team. These might seem a bit obvious, but the important realization is that at these breakpoints hiring decisions are much more important, so if you keep them in mind as hard thresholds you’ll make better scaling decisions.”

Management Scale Hiring

How We Made Claude 3x Faster In Two Weeks

— Sam Attard, Raymond Wang

tl;dr: “This August, we made the core user experience of Claude and the Claude desktop app about 3x faster in a two-week sprint. Users had been telling us it was slow, and they were right. We ran everything from a single Slack channel, with Claude in every thread.”

AI CaseStudy Performance

Aho-Corasick

— Colin James

tl;dr: “This post describes the construction of an Aho-Corasick automaton for the simultaneous matching of substrings within a sequence. I’m fond of this algorithm because it constructs an automaton from an existing tree data structure in a rather pleasant way.”

DeepDive Algo

Most Popular From Last Issue

Ten Things Nobody Tells You When You Become A Manager - Louise Deason

Notable Links

Impeccable: Design vocabulary for agents.

Moli: Headless browser for agents.

OpenDots: AI that moves between text, calls & Slack.

OpenShell: Private runtime for autonomous agents.

Pi: Agent toolkit.

The Context Layer For Agentic Software Development

Your agents know the code. Give them the rest of your organizational context.

Unblocked reasons across your code, conversations, issues, docs, and production systems so agents can complete work correctly with less human intervention.

Try For Free Today

Healthy Feedback

— Anuja Karnik

tl;dr: “Peer-to-peer feedback is a powerful growth tool, and yet candid feedback is rare. We treat all feedback as positive - either to strengthen confidence or improve effectiveness. Based on this principle we can form several patterns for both giving and receiving feedback to help teams improve their interactions.”

Management TeamHealth Feedback

Ten Things Nobody Tells You When You Become A Manager

— Louise Deason

tl;dr: (1) Your job has changed. (2) Stop doing the work. (3) Learn for a month. (4) Accept that you are now the weather. (5) Let them run the 1:1. (6) Embrace the shit. (7) Work out what your new manager wants. (8) Give the hard feedback early. (9) Keep receipts for your people. (10) Know what seat you've taken.

Management NewManager Tips

[Webinar] How To Stop Babysitting Your Agents

— Brandon Waselnuk

tl;dr: Agents can generate code. Getting it right for your system is the hard part – you end up wasting time and tokens in the back and forth. More MCPs solve access but not understanding. Join us for a FREE webinar on Oct 7 to see how leading teams solve this with a context layer (includes a live demo).

Promoted by Unblocked

Event AI Agents

Managing Systems

— Sunil Sadasivan

tl;dr: “This seems complex, but it’s actually quite simple, and I believe it’s the key to being a successful strategic thinker in systems and organizations. This model works in every system I can think of — applications and products, computing systems of limited resources, and people, teams and large-scale organizations.”

Leadership OrgDesign Strategy

“Your calendar should represent a plan to achieve your goals.” — Geoff Woods

You Should All Be Asking Way More Questions

— Sean Goedecke

tl;dr: “When someone is explaining something to me, I ask on average one question every thirty seconds. I’m sure this is frustrating to some people, but it’s actually a good habit and you should do it too.”

CareerGrowth Communication

Test Your Enterprise Auth Flow Locally

tl;dr: Every auth test reaches an environment you do not control. Someone points staging at production credentials, someone else shares a test user, and nobody can force a 503 to test the unhappy paths. @workos/emulate is an open-source WorkOS API server you run yourself. Seed the users, orgs, RBAC, and SSO connections you need, then force any endpoint to fail. Payloads are generated from the WorkOS API spec, so tests match production.

Promoted by WorkOS

OpenSource Testing Auth

The Rise Of The Forward Deployed Engineer - And How To Do The Job Right

— Vinoo Ganesh

tl;dr: “I’ve built pieces of the forward deployed function three times, at three different institutions, over the course of over a decade. Here’s what I’ve seen work, what I’ve seen fail, and where I think this goes.”

Leadership IndustryTrends AI

How I Manage My Agents

— Fatih Arslan

tl;dr: “There are probably hundreds of posts like this. But I wanted to share my workflow about how I create and manage a fleet of agents. I've had huge success with it over the past few months.”

Productivity AI Agents

Tokens Too Cheap To Meter

— Jynn Nelson

tl;dr: “The price of using machine learning intelligence is decreasing by several orders of magnitude a year and shows no signs of slowing. We are likely to see LLMs integrated into every part of computing as infrastructure, not just as a product, in the next year or two.”

Infrastructure IndustryTrends AI

Editorial

What 308 Engineering Leaders Can't Say At Work

Leadership coaches Alia Connor and Fiona Siseman of Frank and Eddy Leadership asked 308 engineering leaders at LDX3 New York: What's the biggest issue you're facing that you don't have a space to talk about at work?

A few themes came up:

AI gains aren't reaching individuals. When a task takes one day instead of five, the time saved goes into more work, not back to the person doing it. Teams are shipping more, but nobody's workload is getting lighter.Speed has a cost, and someone else is paying it. Faster code generation shows up downstream as low-quality PRs, longer reviews, and bugs.Leaders aren't sure what their job is anymore. Some worry they won't have one. Others say AI is making the work feel less meaningful. A few are asking whether they should go back to being hands-on.No one is connecting expectations to reality. At every level, people blamed the layer above them for being unrealistic about AI, but they're afraid to raise concerns. Even middle managers are toeing the line, not voicing what’s happening.

We would love to hear from you. Click reply and let us know the biggest issue you are facing at work.

Thanks to Alia Connor and Fiona Siseman of Frank and Eddy Leadership for sharing the results.

Most Popular From Last Issue

My Development Setup In 2026 - Brandon Weaver

Notable Links

Cate: A spatial desktop IDE.

Design.md: A format specification for describing a visual identity to coding agents.

iFixAi: Independent auditing of agents.

Jev Ultrafast: Fastest and cheapest web agent.

OpenRig: Harness that runs Claude and Codex as one.

Prioritize Your PR Flood

Stop reviewing PRs in the order they arrived. Review in the order that matters.

CodeRabbit Triage is a reviewer-first prioritization layer for the PR queue: a self-updating, cross-repository inbox that tells you which pull request to review next, how deeply to review it and which ones may be safe to close.

Start reviewing the right PRs or tackle low-hanging fruits without leaving the queue.

Find it under Review in CodeRabbit web interface.

Prioritize Your PR Flood With CodeRabbit Triage

Measuring AI’s Impact On Delivery Speed

— James Shore

tl;dr: “Is AI making software development faster? Most people I talk to say “yes.” But how much? What value are you getting for your money? Are there other ways of using AI that have a better ROI?”

Management Metrics AI

Expected Goals

— Mike Fisher

tl;dr: “Write the hypothesis down before the result arrives. Not the goal, the reasoning. What you expect to happen, why you expect it, what would tell you that you were wrong, and what you knew at the time. It is the only way I know to stop your future self from rewriting your past self’s thinking to match whatever happened.“

Management GoalSetting DecisionMaking

Prioritize Your PR Flood

tl;dr: Stop reviewing PRs in the order they arrived. Review in the order that matters. CodeRabbit Triage is a reviewer-first prioritization layer for the PR queue: a self-updating, cross-repository inbox that tells you which pull request to review next, how deeply to review it and which ones may be safe to close. Start reviewing the right PRs or tackle low-hanging fruits without leaving the queue. Find it under Review in CodeRabbit web interface.

Promoted by CodeRabbit

CodeReview AI Security

Introducing CAFE(S): A Framework For Defining AI Context Quality

— Brian Houck

tl;dr: CAFE(S) names five properties of good context. The first four ask whether the context lets agents do good work - clarity, actionability, fidelity and efficiency. The fifth - security - asks whether the context is safe to use at all.

Strategy AI Agents

“Intelligence is an accident of evolution, and not necessarily an advantage.” — Isaac Asimov

Defensive Driving For Your Career

tl;dr: To have a positive career you need to be appropriately recognized and rewarded for your work. The author shares techniques to take credit for your work while “driving defensively.”

Influence CareerGrowth

My Development Setup In 2026

— Brandon Weaver

tl;dr: “As I start to step into another new adventure I took a long hard look at my development setup on my work laptop as well as my home laptop and realized I haven’t really cleaned it up in what, a decade now? It was time for some spring cleaning to get it under control and start asking hard questions about what added value and what had somehow smuggled its way across migrations over the past decade. This post explores some of my setup, why I made certain decisions, and how I’m different now than I was back then.”

Tools+Setup

How To Prepare For AI-Driven Code Modernization Projects

— Jonah Ezekiel, Lexie Tonelli

tl;dr: “This article covers the work enterprises must do before the modernization takes place: defining what done means, what evidence a change must carry, how certified changes will reach production, and what has to be staged so the run can start.“

Architecture TechDebt AI

The Test Suite Is The New Code Review

— Allen Hutchinson

tl;dr: “The fix I’ve settled on is structural. When a piece of functionality is clean enough to stand on its own, I pull it out into its own repository before it tangles into everything else. It gets its own tests, its own merge queue, its own release cadence. An agent working inside it can hold the whole thing in its head.”

CodeReview AI Testing

Design Your Programming Languages Right!

tl;dr: “After two years in stealth, countless technical challenges, and research breakthroughs… I am beyond excited to announce that today, TypeSafe AI is releasing our first System One Model: a new class of frontier models built to make fast, structured decisions that software can use directly.”

LanguageDesign

Most Popular From Last Issue

The Senior Engineer Death Spiral - Sunil Pai

Notable Links

AI Engineering From Scratch: OS curriculum that builds AI algos by hand.

Laya: System 1 decision engine.

OpenCodeReview: AI-powered code review CLI tool.

Hindsight: Agent memory that learns.

Univer: Office harness for agents.

Fewer Findings But All Of Them Real. Only Real Risks Should Reach Your Queue.

AI writes more code than ever and a lot of that of ships with vulnerabilities.

CodeRabbit Security brings continuous code review and security into one AI platform, reasoning across your full codebase to catch complex bugs and vulnerabilities.

It's built for teams shipping at AI speed, where legacy pattern-based scanners can't keep up with AI-generated code.

Free trial includes 10 code scans.

Run CodeRabbit Security On Your Own Repositories Today

Same People

— Mike Fisher

tl;dr: “We rate individuals. We compare individuals in calibration. Our promotion rubric counts individual output. Our improvement plans correct individuals. We pay a premium to hire individuals, on the theory that whatever made them good travels with them in a backpack. We produce performance as an organization and then account for it one person at a time.”

Management PerformanceReviews

The Trendy Leadership Trend That Is Trending

— Jade Rubick

tl;dr: "Leadership is often about trends. Your job is to look at the horizon and identify how things are going to trend: (1) What things are getting better over time? (2) What is getting worse over time? (3) How can you make sure that your organization is getting better in every dimension? Jade shares a simple test to survey your organization."

Leadership Management

Fewer Findings But All Of Them Real. Only Real Risks Should Reach Your Queue.

tl;dr: AI writes more code than ever and a lot of that of ships with vulnerabilities. CodeRabbit Security brings continuous code review and security into one AI platform, reasoning across your full codebase to catch complex bugs and vulnerabilities. It's built for teams shipping at AI speed, where legacy pattern-based scanners can't keep up with AI-generated code. Free trial includes 10 code scans.

Promoted by CodeRabbit

CodeReview AI Security

What I Believe About The Future Of Software Development

— Thorsten Ball

tl;dr: “To plant my flag, to say that these are things I believed in September 2026, here it is on the blog, non-ephemeral. Some of these predictions are just observations, they’ve long been true at companies like Amp. Others will take some time to play out.”

Strategy AI IndustryTrends

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” — Isaac Asimov

The Senior Engineer Death Spiral

— Sunil Pai

tl;dr: “A friend recently got a new job, a very senior role, very well paid, and pretty different from his previous gig. He was asking me how to do a 60 to 80-hour week, how to do well enough to get promoted, etc. and as we talked, I realised he was feeling a bit of imposter syndrome and really wanted to prove himself. I ended up giving him a bit of a monologue. this is more or less what I told him...”

Staff+ WellBeing CareerGrowth

How To Hire Engineers When AI Makes Everyone’s Code Look Good

— Luka Biber

tl;dr: Everyone’s code looks good now. The engineers who matter are the ones who know why it works, and can tell when it doesn’t. Now more than ever, hiring comes down to finding people who understand the why behind what they built and why it was the best solution. Here’s how to find them.

Promoted by Remgu

Management AI Hiring

Trying The Software Factory Pattern

— Will Larson

tl;dr: The software factory pattern is looping on a broad goal, and then relying on the harness to drive progress towards that goal. Will describes the first basic version he’s implemented at his company.

CaseStudy AI Agents

Back To Coupling And Cohesion

— Daniil Bastrich

tl;dr: “In practice, such principles ultimately come down to managing coupling and cohesion in all their forms and at every level of a system. And once we have a good grasp of coupling and cohesion, there is little point in memorizing the alphabet soup of design principles, let alone fetishizing them.”

CodeQuality Architecture

Introducing System One Models & Jev

— Diogo Almeida

tl;dr: “After two years in stealth, countless technical challenges, and research breakthroughs… I am beyond excited to announce that today, TypeSafe AI is releasing our first System One Model: a new class of frontier models built to make fast, structured decisions that software can use directly.”

ReleaseNotes IndustryTrends AI

Most Popular From Last Issue

Nine Questions I Now Ask In Interviews That I Wish I'd Asked Five Years Ago - Louise Deason

Notable Links

Archify: Turn a codebase into a system map.

Atlas: Source control for coding agents.

AX: Google's open agentic orchestration runtime.

Humanizer: Removes signs of AI-generated writing.

Jev Ultrafast: Fastest and cheapest web agent.

Give Agents Access, Not Tokens

AI agents need access to GitHub, Slack, and Google Drive, but handing them user tokens creates credentials that can leak into prompts, logs, and tool calls.

WorkOS Relay keeps each token at WorkOS, attaches it only when an agent makes an approved request, and sends it only to allowlisted hosts.

Your agent completes the task without ever holding the credential.

Build With WorkOS Relay →

Nobody Needs A Human Router

— James Stanier

tl;dr: “The pitch of this article is that engineering management today in the AI age isn’t about upskilling, it’s actually about rediscovery, and the ramp back to your technical best has never been easier with the tools that are now available. Change can be embraced and it can be fun.”

Management AI CareerGrowth

Everything Important Is Optional Until It Isn't

— Steve Huynh

tl;dr: “Everything important and urgent was, at some earlier point, important and not urgent. The expired certificate was once a mere maintenance task. But because it was deferred, it turned into a 2am page that woke up four teams.”

Management TechDebt

Give Agents Access, Not Tokens

— Maria Paktiti

tl;dr: AI agents need access to GitHub, Slack, and Google Drive, but handing them user tokens creates credentials that can leak into prompts, logs, and tool calls. WorkOS Relay keeps each token at WorkOS, attaches it only when an agent makes an approved request, and sends it only to allowlisted hosts. Your agent completes the task without ever holding the credential.

Promoted by WorkOS

Auth Security Agents

AI Is Making Activity-Based Engineering Metrics Obsolete

— Bharat Sharma

tl;dr: “AI has made activity proxies like lines of code, commits and PR counts actively misleading. Here is what to measure instead, and a 90-day plan to get there.”

Management AI Metrics

“One of the best ways to influence people is to make them feel important.” ― Roy T. Bennett

Tell Agents The Why, Not Just The How

— Sean Goedecke

tl;dr: “Models are now smart enough to have meaningful input on your broader goals. If you’re just prompting them with a concrete technical spec, you are committing the same mistake as in the XY problem: asking expert advice without giving the expert the context it needs.”

Communication AI Agents

How LegalOn Validates Agent-Written Code Before Merge

tl;dr: LegalOn's 200+ engineers ship across multi-region GKE, and their platform team rebuilt the golden path so coding agents count as users of it, not just authors of code. Agents validate changes against real dependencies before a PR merges, and more than half of the infrastructure repo's 300 daily PRs need no human review. Their realization behind the platform: writing code was never the bottleneck.

Promoted by Signadot

Agents DevEx PlatformEngineering

That Test isn’t Flaky. It’s Broken.

— Will Keleher

tl;dr: “My favorite tool to flush out intermittently failing tests is running the test suite on an hourly cron. The crux is using a commit that has already passed CI on master/main so that you can be sure that every failure represents a true problem of some sort. Once you have a way of discovering and tracking intermittent failures, it’s relatively straightforward to start driving the failure rate down.”

DevEx CodeQuality Testing

Git Worktree Gotchas

— Olaf Alders

tl;dr: “All of the sharp edges we discussed are the result of .git in a linked worktree not being what you first might expect. So if you remember one thing from today, let it be “.git can be a directory or it can be a pointer and which one you get depends on where you are.”

DeepDive Git

Nine Questions I Now Ask In Interviews That I Wish I'd Asked Five Years Ago

— Louise Deason

tl;dr: “Here are nine questions that have served me well. Some of them are diagnostic. Some of them are trapdoors. All of them have, at one point or another, told me something the company did not realise they were telling me.”

InterviewAdvice

Most Popular From Last Issue

Why I Stopped Arguing With People - Cong Wang

Notable Links

Security Audit: Skill for multi-phase security audits.

Superpowers: Agentic skills framework & dev methodology.

OpenCodeReview: AI-powered code review CLI tool.

OpenResearch: Local-first workspace for research agents.

WeKnora: OS LLM knowledge platform.

The Context Layer For Agentic Software Development

Your agents know the code. Give them the rest of the context.

Unblocked reasons across your code, conversations, issues, docs, and production systems so agents can complete work correctly with less human intervention.

Try For Free Today

The Executive Loop

— Jade Rubick

tl;dr: The job of an executive follows a very simple algorithm: (1) Figure out what needs to happen. (2) Figure out how to make it happen. (3) Make it happen. This is simple, but it’s not easy. In fact, it’s so simple it seems dumb to lay it out. But it’s surprisingly... well, not something people take to automatically.

Leadership Management

Confessions Of An Unrepentant Slop Snob

— Charity Majors

tl;dr: “So maybe we all just need to be ruthlessly outcome-oriented. Build the best thing we can, as fast as we can. AI is a powerful and versatile tool, so we should use it wherever we can to make our work better and do it faster. Is it really that simple? I had nearly convinced myself that it was, when I noticed how contradictory my own behavior had become.” Charity shares a framework for thinking about when AI involvement is additive or a violation.

Management CareerGrowth AI

[Webinar] How To Stop Babysitting Your Agents

— Brandon Waselnuk

tl;dr: Agents can generate code. Getting it right for your system is the hard part – you end up wasting time and tokens in the back and forth. More MCPs solve access but not understanding. Join us for a FREE webinar on Sep 23 to see how leading teams solve this with a context layer (includes a live demo).

Promoted by Unblocked

Event AI Agents

Why I Stopped Arguing With People

— Cong Wang

tl;dr: “Over the years I’ve slowly stopped arguing. Not because I stopped caring about being right, but because I finally understood what an argument actually is, and what it can and cannot do. Here is what changed my mind.”

Communication Influence

“Start with the end in mind.” ― Stephen R. Covey

We Are All Product Engineers Now

— Laurie Voss

tl;dr: “This post is an attempt to build on those and make a forecast of where the industry is going in the next 10 years. Making a 10 year forecast of anything is of course a crazy thing to try to do, and especially about the business of software right now. To make it, I had to make two very big assumptions.”

AI Product IndustryTrends

Go Ahead, Use AI Coding Agents. Security Teams Approve

tl;dr: Your devs are using AI coding agents. Bad news: That’s a security risk. Good news: It doesn’t have to be. With Coder Agents, the credentials don’t leave the control plane. It runs in your own environment with every action tied to an SSO identity. Approve models you trust, cap spending at the team level, and view the full audit trail.

Promoted by Coder

Agents Infrastructure Security

What Is Happening With Code Reviews?

— Gergely Orosz

tl;dr: “One question haunting the minds of CTOs and heads of engineering whom I’ve been talking with, is how to deal with large quantities of code review which have only been growing now that AI agents generate most code at many tech companies.”

Management AI CodeReview

How Well Do Agents Use Test And Verification Techniques?

— Dan Luu

tl;dr: “Here, we test if simple instructions to agents to use particular techniques or libraries improve implementation correctness, as a kind of test to see how effective agents are when guided by someone with no expertise in testing who's maybe heard that you should apply certain techniques or use certain libraries.”

AI Testing Agents

The Startup's Postgres Survival Guide

— Alexander Belanger

tl;dr: “Over the past half year or so, I’ve been writing an internal doc for our engineers trying to distill two years of Postgres battles into a somewhat cohesive document. While I love the Postgres manual, I find it’s hard to turn to when shit hits the fan because it’s just so darn comprehensive. I thought this might be useful for others and would appreciate feedback (or other tidbits that you’ve learned running Postgres in production).”

Guide Database PostgreSQL

Most Popular From Last Issue

How To Grow Past Senior Engineer - Gregor Ojstersek

Notable Links

Claude-Red: Security skills for Claude.

Flowsint: OS OSINT graph exploration tool.

Localsend: OS cross-platform alternative to AirDrop.

WebLLM: In-browser LLM inference engine.

Worktrunk: CLI for Git worktree management.

WorkOS: Sell To Enterprise Without Rebuilding Your Auth Layer

Every enterprise deal arrives with the same checklist: SAML and OIDC SSO, SCIM provisioning, audit logs, RBAC. They land one at a time, each holding up the process.

WorkOS handles all of it. Add SSO for the first deal, Directory Sync when SCIM comes up, audit logs and RBAC when a customer needs them. Over 2,000 companies run on WorkOS, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cursor.

Make Your App Enterprise-Ready →

How To Grow Past Senior Engineer

— Gregor Ojstersek

tl;dr: In this article, you can expect 4 actionable pieces of advice on making a move to your next step and make a convincing proposal to increase your chances. I’ll cover: (1) Talking to your manager. (2) Keeping a brag list of all the wins that you achieve. (3) Become the go-to person for a specific project, specific technology, or specific domain. (4) Propose an impactful improvement to the codebase and own the implementation.

CareerGrowth Staff+

The Semmelweis Reflex

— Mike Fisher

tl;dr: “This week, think back to the last time a report, a survey, a customer complaint or a colleague’s warning challenged one of your own decisions. Yours, not the organization’s. Ask what you did with it, and then ask what happened to the person who carried it in. Did the evidence get a fair hearing, or did a reasonable-sounding explanation make it easier to set aside?“

Leadership DecisionMaking Feedback

Test Enterprise Auth Locally, Not In Production

— Maria Paktiti

tl;dr: WorkOS Emulate is an open source, in-memory WorkOS API that runs on localhost. Point your test suite at it, seed users, organizations, RBAC, and SSO connections, drive full login flows, and inject failures with error hooks. Event names and payloads come from the WorkOS API spec, so your tests see exactly what production sends.

Promoted by WorkOS

Testing Auth

5 Things World-Class Engineers Do That You Don't

— Steve Huynh

tl;dr: “After participating in many such conversations, both through my podcast and during my time at Amazon, I have recognized a handful of patterns that have held over the decades and across different companies. What follows is my running list of those patterns, the ones that keep surfacing whenever I sit down with someone elite. There are five of them, and I explain the gap between what they do and where most other people stop.”

CareerGrowth

“What you stay focused on will grow.” ― Roy T. Bennett

Wisdom Isn’t Hard To Find, It’s Hard To Receive

— Yew Jin Lim

tl;dr: "Wisdom is the ability to act on a truth before experience makes it obvious. That’s different from intelligence. Intelligence helps you figure things out for yourself while wisdom tells you which lessons you don’t need to insist on learning yourself.”

Leadership CareerGrowth

Authentication And Authorization For Internal MCP Servers

— Paul Vatterott

tl;dr: Your internal MCP server can give LLMs access to everything by default, with no auth layer to stop them. This post shows how to lock it down with roles, granular scopes, and Enterprise SSO so employees and their AI assistants only reach the data they're cleared for.

Promoted by PropelAuth

Agents Auth Security

The End Of Code Review? Or An Opportunity To Rethink It?

— Christian Kästner

tl;dr: “Implicit in this discussion is often the assumption that our prior code review practices were a gold standard, something to save or something to mourn. But is that really the case?”

IndustryTrends AI CodeReview

How One Connection Kills A Database

— Simeon Griggs

tl;dr: “Years ago at GitHub, this was a question Sam Lambert would ask in interviews. The solution involved a downed database that started with a MySQL schema change needing an exclusive lock on a table, but it couldn't get one. Another session had already touched that table and never committed. That open transaction blocked the schema change.”

CaseStudy Debugging Database

I Asked 100 Agents To Hack Me

— Shrivu Shankar

tl;dr: “I figured this would be a useful exercise to see where the models are at and how vulnerable I am before these kinds of attacks become more common.”

CaseStudy Agents Security

Most Popular From Last Issue

How Anthropic Builds And How Engineering Will Change Soon - Thariq Shihipar, Ryan Peterman

Notable Links

Archify: Turn a codebase into a system map.

FMT: Modern formatting library.

God's Eye View: Live OS spatial intelligence on a 3D globe.

Humanizer: Removes signs of AI-generated writing.

Spec Kit: OS toolkit for building software with any agent.

Prioritize Your PR Flood

Stop reviewing PRs in the order they arrived. Review in the order that matters.

CodeRabbit Triage is a reviewer-first prioritization layer for the PR queue: a self-updating, cross-repository inbox that tells you which pull request to review next, how deeply to review it and which ones may be safe to close.

Start reviewing the right PRs or tackle low-hanging fruits without leaving the queue.

Find it under Review in CodeRabbit web interface.

Prioritize Your PR Flood With CodeRabbit Triage

How To Be Direct And Strategic

— Yue Zhao

tl;dr: "I saw an issue with a process on my team recently and brought it up directly in a team meeting a few days later. I was very direct about the problem, gave all the details, and explained how it impacted everyone. To my surprise, my manager shut it down completely, and now I cannot get any buy-in from anyone. What happened? Where did I do wrong?"

Leadership Communication

Maintaining Context As A Manager And Leveraging AI Agents

— James Samuel

tl;dr: My workflow for doing this is built around three main skills. They help my AI agent understand what matters to me, what information it should pay attention to, and how to turn that information into a list I read before starting my day. (1) projects.md (2) people.md (3) daily.md.

Management Productivity AI

Prioritize Your PR Flood

tl;dr: "Stop reviewing PRs in the order they arrived. Review in the order that matters. CodeRabbit Triage is a reviewer-first prioritization layer for the PR queue: a self-updating, cross-repository inbox that tells you which pull request to review next, how deeply to review it and which ones may be safe to close. Start reviewing the right PRs or tackle low-hanging fruits without leaving the queue. Find it under Review in CodeRabbit web interface."

Promoted by CodeRabbit

CodeReview AI Security

Maybe We Shouldn't Be Reviewing All This Code

— Rachel Laycock

tl;dr: “Perhaps the problem isn't that AI has broken code review, maybe it’s that we've been using code review to solve the wrong problems.”

TechDebt AI CodeReview

“Strength can be defeated with strategy.” — Amit Kalantri

How Anthropic Builds And How Engineering Will Change Soon

— Ryan Peterman, Thariq Shihipar

tl;dr: “When I talk with my friends who work at Anthropic it always surprises me how far ahead they are in adopting AI within their processes and workflows. Generally what engineers in the industry start doing, these top AI labs have already been doing for a while.”

DevEx AI

Foundation Models For Blockchain Intelligence In The AI Arms Race

— Guilherme Marmerola

tl;dr: A look at how TRM is building a transformer-based blockchain foundation model, learning from public and proprietary on-chain data so investigators can find threats by behavior.

Promoted by TRM Labs

Guide AI

My Agentic Coding Setup, July 2026

— Domenic Denicola

tl;dr: “Things are changing very fast, and I have no illusions that this will be a timeless nugget of wisdom. But talking to some friends and scrolling through X posts, it does seem that I might have some techniques in play that are not widespread.”

DevEx AI

How To Name Things

— Koleman Nix

tl;dr: “What you should be consistent about is this process of naming itself. The decision of what to name something should take in as many inputs as you can gather, not just the type of the thing, and not even just its current usage.”

Communication CodeQuality

A Faster Way To Convert A Timestamp --> Hour, Min, Sec

— Ben Joffe

tl;dr: “Nearly all major date / time libraries compute hour, minute and second the same way - slowly. In this article, I will dive deep into this little problem, and demonstrate a seemingly impossible claim.”

DeepDive Algo Performance

Most Popular From Last Issue

The Art Of Simplifying Decisions - David Pereira

Notable Links

Diagram Design: Editorial diagram types for Claude Code.

Exoharness: Minimal architecture for building agents.

Foreman: AI agents run the loop, humans judge.

HyperFrames: OS framework turning HTML + CSS into video

Zstandard: Real-time compression algorithm.

Fewer Findings But All Of Them Real. Only Real Risks Should Reach Your Queue.

AI writes more code than ever and a lot of that of ships with vulnerabilities.

CodeRabbit Security brings continuous code review and security into one AI platform, reasoning across your full codebase to catch complex bugs and vulnerabilities.

It's built for teams shipping at AI speed, where legacy pattern-based scanners can't keep up with AI-generated code.

Free trial includes 10 code scans.

Run CodeRabbit Security On Your Own Repositories Today

The Rise Of The End-To-End Operator

— Wes Kao

tl;dr: “At all types of organizations, I’m seeing more high-performers get rewarded when they can handle projects end-to-end. If a normal operator is an infantry soldier, these operators are Navy SEALs. They can parachute into unknown territory to quickly assess a situation. Then determine the best course of action.”

CareerGrowth

Load-Bearing People

— Mike Fisher

tl;dr: “Pick your most critical system, process or relationship and name the one person holding it up. Then ask what happens if that person is unreachable for a month starting tomorrow. If the answer scares you, write it down before the feeling passes, because these risks survive on the decision to think about it later.”

Management TeamHealth

Fewer Findings But All Of Them Real. Only Real Risks Should Reach Your Queue.

tl;dr: AI writes more code than ever and a lot of that of ships with vulnerabilities. CodeRabbit Security brings continuous code review and security into one AI platform, reasoning across your full codebase to catch complex bugs and vulnerabilities. It's built for teams shipping at AI speed, where legacy pattern-based scanners can't keep up with AI-generated code. Free trial includes 10 code scans.

Promoted by CodeRabbit

CodeReview AI Security

The Art Of Simplifying Decisions

— David Pereira

tl;dr: “For too long, we’ve endured complex decision-making approaches. Now that decisions are clearly our bottleneck, I’m bullish on those who can simplify them. I want to share my approach with you, and how you can bring it to your scenario. I hope this helps you simplify what others complicate.”

Leadership DecisionMaking

“A one-on-one is a place to listen for what your employee isn’t saying.” — Michael Lopp

The Mistakes You're Allowed To Make

— Steve Huynh

tl;dr: My friend said something to me once that I’ve been repeating ever since: “Bad news delivered early is just called news.” I think about that line every time I make a mistake.

Communication CareerGrowth

More Than Half of My Candidates Use AI on the Initial Screening Call. Here Is How I Tell.

— Luka Biber

tl;dr: “I want engineers who use AI to write code faster. I do not want candidates quietly reading AI answers to questions about a language they have supposedly mastered over ten or twenty years. The initial screening call is where you find out which one you have.”

Promoted by Remgu

Management AI

The Safest Job From AI May Be Writing

— Murat Demirbas

tl;dr: While the programmer's job description is getting completely refactored, writing remains surprisingly unaffected. LLMs have gotten very good at generating code, but I am appalled at the absolute shit they spew as prose... I am increasingly convinced LLMs will not threaten decent writers anytime soon. My prediction rests on the three observations below. Tell me where my logic does not hold up.

AI CareerGrowth

Let's Build A Compressor From Scratch

— Adolfo Ochagavía

tl;dr: “Compression is one of those wonderful things we have grown accustomed to in the computer world. You wave a magic wand and — poof! — a file suddenly shrinks to a fraction of its size! You wave the wand again and — pop!— the original file is restored down to the last bit. How can this possibly work? Let’s find out!”

DeepDive Algo

Building Autonomous Goal Loops That Deliver

— Jarred Kenny

tl;dr: “The agent keeps moving, but movement is not the problem. The tests only protect what we already know, and the important failures sit outside them. A screen can look complete while it stores nothing. An agent can give the right answer for the wrong reason. A scorer can reward behavior no user wants. More turns make each of those failures cheaper and faster.”

Testing AI Agents

Most Popular From Last Issue

How To Figure Out Your Next Career Move - Cliff Maxwell

Notable Links

Archify: Turn a codebase into a system map.

BrowserSkill: Let agents use your logged-in browser.

ECC: Agent harness performance optimization system.

FMT: Modern formatting library.

Wigolo: The go-to web for your agent.

The Context Layer For Modern Engineering Teams

Unblocked turns code, docs, tickets, conversations and production data into actionable context, so engineers move faster and agents stay on track.

Try For Free Today

Coaching Questions That Work

— Dan Rockwell

tl;dr: Some questions focus on situations. What happened? What’s wrong? What do you want? Begin with situations, but don’t park there. Coaching questions turn attention to the person. (1) What did you notice about yourself in that meeting? (2) What was going on for you when she said that? (3) What do you make of your reaction?

Management Coaching Tips

Modern Engineering Values

— Christoph Nakazawa

tl;dr: “I’ve been trying to wrap my head around engineering values and principles that matter for 2026 and beyond that will help individuals and organizations move faster. Looking at my engineering workflow it feels like on one hand everything changed, and on the other, not that much."

Management AI

[Webinar] How To Stop Babysitting Your Agents

— Brandon Waselnuk

tl;dr: Agents can generate code. Getting it right for your system is the hard part – you end up wasting time and tokens in the back and forth. More MCPs solve access but not understanding. Join us for a FREE webinar on Sep 2 to see how to give agents exactly what they need the first time (includes a live demo).

Promoted by Unblocked

Event AI Agents

How To Figure Out Your Next Career Move

— Cliff Maxwell

tl;dr: “In this post, I’ll help you answer six fundamental questions that will instill confidence and focus anytime you are navigating a transition at work. Each question comes with exercises and tools to help you build understanding.”

CareerGrowth Guide

“For things that you do not fully control, you should set internal goals rather than external ones.” — James Stanier

Responsibility Is Taken Before It Is Given

— Lalit Maganti

tl;dr: “To get promoted as a software engineer in Big Tech, you generally need to show “ownership” of a product or area. This means being responsible for it and deciding what should happen over time.”

Staff+ CareerGrowth

How Laurel's AI-Native Team Ships More Verified Code

tl;dr: In three months, Laurel scaled agent-authored PRs from 55% to 76% of engineering output while cutting change failure rate by over 80%. Lightweight per-PR environments enable them to verify changes at agent scale and ship more code with fewer failures. Their ~60-engineer team now merges 2,300+ PRs a month. Take a look at their stack and what they implemented to get there.

Promoted by Signadot

CaseStudy DevEx AI

Bug Blindness

— Dan Luu

tl;dr: “I used to wonder why I see so many more bugs than most people. I easily observe hundreds to thousands of bugs per week and nothing seems to work, but most people I talk to don't see anything like this. For a long time, I thought this had something to do with how I use computers but, over time, I've realized that it's mostly that people are hitting the same bugs and don't notice.”

CodeQuality Debugging

Three Mistakes Of New AI Teams

— Doug Turnbull

tl;dr: “A surprising amount of the pain I see on AI teams looks very much like what budding search teams in the 2010s went through. Admittedly this gives me a biased perspective, but perhaps a useful one.”

Management AI

How To Write An Effective Software Design Document

— Michael Lynch

tl;dr: “I’ve written design docs as a developer at Google, Microsoft, and within my own companies. The specifics vary, but the underlying principles remain the same. A design doc should articulate the hard problems you’re solving and help your teammates give you feedback. Below, I share my approach to creating effective design docs and explain what belongs in a design doc and what does not.”

KnowledgeManagement Guide

Editorial Note

I'll be at LeadDev's LDX3 this September 15–16, looking forward to the conversations on how engineering leadership is changing.

I find it useful to hear from people doing the work and those that read this newsletter. If you're going too, I'd love to meet in person. Reply and let me know.

Most Popular From Last Issue

Elephants, Goldfish And The New Golden Age Of Software Engineering - Dave Resin

Notable Links

Experiential: OS gateway and router for agent workflows.

Foreman: AI agents run the loop, humans judge.

Heretic: Fully automatic censorship removal for LLMs

OpenViking: Context database for agents.

VoiceStudio: OS fully-local ElevenLabs alternative.

Review The Actual Change, Not The File List

AI writes more code than ever. Reviewing it shouldn’t mean scrolling forty files in alphabetical order.

CodeRabbit Review reorganizes any pull request from a flat file list into a structured, layer-by-layer walkthrough - the logical reading order of the change, not the order your platform happens to sort it.

Every range gets its own plain-language summary, with sequence diagrams, state machines, and ERDs generated inline wherever a visual earns its place.

• Cohorts group related files and chunks so you review one idea at a time.

• Layers order them so foundational changes - data shapes, contracts - come before the code that depends on them.

• Code Peek lets you click any variable, function, class or type to see its definition and usages without leaving the tab.

• Semantic Diff cuts past formatting noise to show what actually changed.

From the team that pioneered AI code reviews. 2M reviews every week. 6M repos. 15K customers. Free during early access.

Review Your Next PR With CodeRabbit Review Today

The 80/20 Rule For Your Whole Life

— Yew Jin Lim

tl;dr: “The best investment framework isn’t the one that maximizes returns. The best career strategy isn’t the one that eliminates risk. The best contemplative practice isn’t the one that promises instant transformation. The best framework is the one you’ll stick with. For me, that’s been a boring foundation with a laboratory on top.”

CareerGrowth

Elephants, Goldfish And The New Golden Age Of Software Engineering

— Dave Resin

tl;dr: “I argue that most of us are using our AI tools - including basic chatbots - wrong. I will propose a different approach that I hope will be valuable no matter who you are or what you do for a living. This section is for everyone and it sets up what follows.”

Management Productivity AI

Review The Actual Change, Not The File List.

tl;dr: AI writes more code than ever. Reviewing it shouldn’t mean scrolling forty files in alphabetical order. CodeRabbit Review reorganizes any pull request from a flat file list into a structured, layer-by-layer walkthrough - the logical reading order of the change, not the order your platform happens to sort it. Every range gets its own plain-language summary, with sequence diagrams, state machines, and ERDs generated inline wherever a visual earns its place. (1) Cohorts group related files and chunks so you review one idea at a time. (2) Layers order them so foundational changes - data shapes, contracts - come before the code that depends on them. (3) Code Peek lets you click any variable, function, class or type to see its definition and usages without leaving the tab. (4) Semantic Diff cuts past formatting noise to show what actually changed. From the team that pioneered AI code reviews. 2M reviews every week. 6M repos. 15K customers. Free during early access.

Promoted by CodeRabbit

Tools+Setup AI CodeReview

How Much Can You Hold Before It Breaks?

— Steve Huynh

tl;dr: “My optimal approach for a person has two parts, and each one addresses one of those problems. First, we want to pick a single piece of high-priority, high-impact work and protect it, so that whatever else happens, the thing that matters gets done. Second, we want to cut the number of things in flight down to as few as we can stand, so the switching costs are minimized. We want one thing at the top, and as little as possible underneath it.”

Management Productivity

“A good piece of written communication is the most effective means of broadcasting ideas and scaling yourself.” — Will Larson

Three Resume Tips

— Sumner Evans

tl;dr: “In this article, I would like discuss the content of your resume. I’m going to describe three rules that I made up to guide your resume’s content.”

Tips CareerGrowth

Authentication And Authorization For Internal MCP Servers

— Paul Vatterott

tl;dr: Your internal MCP server can give LLMs access to everything by default, with no auth layer to stop them. This post shows how to lock it down with roles, granular scopes, and Enterprise SSO so employees and their AI assistants only reach the data they're cleared for.

Promoted by PropelAuth

Agents Auth Security

Making Your Data Ready For Agentic AI

— Prem Chandrasekaran, Pramod Sadalage

tl;dr: “Before any agent framework can produce useful outcomes, your data has to be in a shape that a machine can consume, trust, and act on. In this article, we discuss what your data needs to look like for agentic AI to derive value from it.”

AI DataEngineering Agents

We Need To Talk About Migrations With AI

— Gergely Orosz

tl;dr: “OpenAI put an impressive-sounding case study about how they helped Asana save $5.9M with a single migration. “Asana cleared 5 years of engineering work in 2 weeks with Codex. Using OpenAI Codex, Asana replaced an outdated testing system in two weeks for about $12K.” Gergely dive into this claim and discusses how migrations are changing.

TechDebt AI IndustryTrends

How We Saved 100 Terabytes Of Memory By Optimizing 1.1.1.1’s DNS Cache

— Sebastiaan Neuteboom

tl;dr: “Five successive changes to how cache entries are stored in memory cut the per-entry footprint by over 50%. Across our fleet, these changes freed up roughly 100 terabytes of memory, equivalent to the amount of RAM in 130 of our Gen 13 servers. The cache also got faster. Insert throughput rose 43% and lookup latency dropped 19%, as fewer allocations and better memory locality meant we did not trade speed for space.”

CaseStudy Scale Performance

Most Popular From Last Issue

Adapting To AI: Leadership - Colin Breck

Notable Links

Archify: Turn a codebase into a system map.

BookOrbit: Self-hosted library and reading platform.

Ghidra: Software reverse engineering framework.

Guidelines: Help agents write modern Go.

Sourcebot: Self-hosted tool to helps understand your codebase.