Friday 3rd March issue is presented by SerpApi

SerpApi: The Ultimate Sidekick For Your AI Applications

AI is smarter when it can search the web. How are AI companies doing it? Meet the worst-kept secret in the AI industry: the SerpApi web search API:
👉 Scrape Google and other search engines (including AI overviews, Maps, Shopping, Amazon, and more)
👉 Integrate with a dead-simple GET request that any agent can make.
👉 Used by NVIDIA, Uber, Adobe, and even the United Nations.

Give it a try now; no sign-up needed.

Explore our Playground

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

— Wes Kao

tl;dr: I often get readers who ask, “Wes, if I’m not naturally loud, how do I speak up or talk about my accomplishments? How do I gain more visibility, either internally in my company or externally online?”

CareerAdvice

What Kinds Of New Debt Are Teams Accumulating With AI?

— Lizzie Matusov

tl;dr: Dr. Margaret-Anne Storey at the University of Victoria proposes a “triple debt model” for reasoning about software system health, drawing on recent empirical research on developer cognition, AI-assisted development, and software evolution. The paper is a conceptual framework, not a controlled experiment - it synthesizes findings across multiple studies to argue that technical debt alone is an incomplete lens.

Leadership Management

The Ultimate Sidekick for Your AI Applications

tl;dr: AI is smarter when it can search the web. How are AI companies doing it? Meet the worst-kept secret in the AI industry: the SerpApi web search API: (1) Scrape Google and other search engines (including AI overviews, Maps, Shopping, Amazon, and more). (2) Integrate with a dead-simple GET request that any agent can make. (3) Used by NVIDIA, Uber, Adobe, and even the United Nations.

Promoted by SerpApi

Tools

What I Learned From Nearly 1,000 Interviews At Amazon

— Steve Huynh

tl;dr: “A Bar Raiser is a specially trained interviewer whose job is to ensure that every hire raises the average talent level at Amazon. I had veto power over any candidate. I sat on nearly a thousand interview loops across every level from intern to Principal Engineer.” Steven discusses the patterns that emerged.

Leadership Management Hiring

No Semicolons Needed

— Terts Diepraam

tl;dr: “I'm making a scripting language called Roto. Like so many programming languages before it, it has the goal of being easy to use and read. Many languages end up making semicolons to delimit or terminate statements optional to that end. I want that too!”

LanguageDesign

IaCConf: How Teams Manage IaC At Scale

tl;dr: Most IaC content focuses on theory. This virtual conference is different. IaCConf brings together engineers sharing what’s actually working in production - from scaling to managing complexity across teams. Real lessons from operators and practical patterns you can apply.

Promoted by Spacelift

Event

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).”

Agents

Reading Leaked Claude Code Source Code

tl;dr: “Anthropic accidentally leaked a source map file containing the full, unobfuscated TypeScript source code. 1,897 files around 132,000 LOC. What I found is a piece of software that is surprisingly more opinionated and more paranoid than I expected. Here are some of things that I found worth talking about.”

Claude Design

Architecture Decision Record

— Martin Fowler

tl;dr: “An Architecture Decision Record (ADR) is a short document that captures and explains a single decision relevant to a product or ecosystem. Documents should be short, just a couple of pages, and contain the decision, the context for making it, and significant ramifications. They should not be modified if the decision is changed, but linked to a superseding decision.”

Documentation

Null Pointer

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Most Popular From Last Issue

Nobody Is Coming To Save Your Career - Steve Huynh

Notable Links

Claude Code (Thread): Collection of lesser-known features & workflows.

Hermes: Agent that grows with you.

Openscreen: OS alternative to screen studio.

Open Terminal: A computer you can curl.

Pg_textsearch: Modern ranked text search for Postgres.

Tuesday 31st March issue is presented by WorkOS

WorkOS FGA: The Authorization Layer For AI Agents

Every AI agent demo looks magical, but most hit a wall in enterprise deployment. It's not model quality or latency. It's authorization. Authentication proves an agent's identity. Authorization defines its blast radius.

The winners in enterprise AI won't have the most features.They'll be the ones enterprises can safely trust. Learn how WorkOS FGA scopes that blast radius with resource-level permissions.

Read The Deep Dive →

How Do You Know If You’re A Good Leader?

— Mike Fisher

tl;dr: “Feeling unsure may not be a sign that you’re failing as a leader. It may be a sign that you’re taking the role seriously enough to do the hardest work first, the work inside your own head. That kind of introspection raises a harder question for the rest of us: How do you actually know if you’re a good leader?”

Leadership Management

Nobody Is Coming To Save Your Career

— Steve Huynh

tl;dr: “Most people assume someone will tap them on the shoulder when it’s time. In my experience, that assumption is the single biggest reason high performers get stuck. Here are three truths about who owns your career, and what to do if you realize that you’re trapped on the wrong side of them.”

CareerAdvice

WorkOS Pipes: The Connectivity Layer For AI Agents

— Zack Proser, Dan Doorman, Michael Hadley

tl;dr: Your product can't see what's in Slack, GitHub, or Salesforce. Most tools are locked to their own database, blind to everything users actually live in - and that's the ceiling on what you can build. WorkOS Pipes removes it. One API call connects your product to the apps your users already use, so you can pull context across silos, power agents that act across services, and never think about credential management again.

Promoted by WorkOS

Agents

What About Juniors?

— Marc Brooker

tl;dr: “In any time of change, the people who can learn and adapt fastest are most likely to succeed. The senior’s advantage is that they have a lot of knowledge and context. The junior’s advantage is that they come in knowing that they need to learn, adapt, and change.”

CareerAdvice

Software Engineering Splits In Three

— Matteo Collina

tl;dr: AI-assisted development shifts software engineering’s bottleneck from coding to judgment, changing how organizations build software. The article outlines three emerging tiers — from tech giants to small businesses — and explains evolving roles, talent needs, and why platforms, guardrails, and senior expertise become critical.

Leadership Management

Analyze Privileged Sessions At Scale

tl;dr: Reviewing sessions manually doesn't scale. Teleport analyzes activity across infrastructure, generating summaries, flagging anomalies, and adding context so teams can investigate faster. From audits to incident response, get clear visibility into what actually happened. Investigate sessions faster.

Promoted by Teleport

Observability Incidents

Scaling A Monolith To 1M LOC: 113 Pragmatic Lessons From Tech Lead To CTO

— Jack Kinsella

tl;dr: A practical guide to scaling a large codebase, covering performance, system design, monitoring, and team practices. It outlines common issues like database bottlenecks and deployment risks, along with strategies for debugging, testing, and maintaining reliability as systems and teams grow.

Architecture BestPractices

Harness Design For Long-Running Application Development

— Prithvi Rajasekaran

tl;dr: “Harness design is key to performance at the frontier of agentic coding. Here's how we pushed Claude further in frontend design and long-running autonomous software engineering.”

Design

How To Do AI-Assisted Engineering

— Gregor Ojstersek

tl;dr: Engineers and engineering leaders share how they are doing AI-assisted engineering. They come from a variety of backgrounds and a range of company sizes, from startups to mid-sized and large organizations.

BestPractices

Most Popular From Last Issue

How Can Engineering Leaders Assess Their AI Maturity? - Lizzie Matusov

Notable Links

Claude Code: Best practice.

Cq: Open standard for shared agent learning.

Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager.

Pgmicro: In-process reimplementation of PostgreSQL.

VibeVoice: OS frontier voice AI.

Friday 27th March issue is presented by PropelAuth

One Prompt. Complete Auth.

Design the perfect auth and onboarding experience for your users with PropelAuth's new Integration MCP Server. Pick and choose which features you need, and seamlessly match your product's look and feel.

Don't worry about auth: your agent can handle it while you work on your YC application.

Try PropelAuth Today

How Can Engineering Leaders Assess Their AI Maturity?

— Lizzie Matusov

tl;dr: “Every engineering organization is adopting AI in some form — but the gap between teams experimenting with copilots and teams running autonomous workflows is large. Most leaders know they’re “using AI,” but few have a clear picture of how deeply it’s actually integrated, or what capabilities they’d need to build to get more value from it. This week we ask: How can engineering leaders assess their AI maturity, and what does it take to move to the next level?”

Leadership Management

Creating Momentum When An Employee Is Stuck

— Lara Hogan

tl;dr: “So what do you do when you’re working with a teammate who is stuck in a cycle of unhelpful or unproductive behavior? You’ve got empathy for them; you don’t want to be a jerk about it. But you still need this person to change course and start moving forward.”

Leadership Management

One Prompt. Complete Auth.

tl;dr: Design the perfect auth and onboarding experience for your users with PropelAuth's new Integration MCP Server. Pick and choose which features you need, and seamlessly match your product's look and feel. Don't worry about auth: your agent can handle it while you work on your YC application.

Promoted by PropelAuth

Tools

Things I Believe

— Lee Robinson

tl;dr: (1) Shipping fast beats the best strategy. (2) You have no career ceiling. (3) Be ruthlessly truth seeking. (4) Communication is the job. (5) Education is the best form of developer marketing. (6) Leadership means owning outcomes beyond the org chart. (7) Work can also be your hobby. (8) Demos > memos. (9) Hiring is what separates good leaders from great. (10) Always try to assume good intent.

CareerAdvice

My Heuristics Are Wrong. What Now?

— Marc Brooker

tl;dr: “We’ve seen this play out in small ways before. Over the last decade, I’ve frequently been frustrated by experienced folks who didn’t update their system design heuristics to match the cloud, to match SSDs, to match 100Gb/s networks, and so on. But this is the biggest change I’ve seen in my career by far. An extinction-level event for rules of thumb.”

CareerAdvice

What Comes After Your IDE?

tl;dr: Stop herding your AI agents across terminals and branches. Intent bundles each task into a single workspace with a living spec, agent notes, and full change visibility. Orchestrate agents like a system, not a swarm: direct specialists, keep work aligned, and ship without copy-pasting context. Free with your existing Augment / Claude Code / Codex / OpenCode subscription.

Promoted by AugmentCode

Tools

Small Programming Tricks

— Will Keleher

tl;dr: “But I think there are some nuggets of knowledge that are particularly valuable and don’t require a lot of supporting mental infrastructure. You don’t need to know any python to use python3 -m http.server to start a simple server in a directory, but it might still make your work marginally easier.” Will shares a few examples.

Tips

How to Kill The Code Review

— Ankit Jain

tl;dr: “The answer is to move the human checkpoint upstream. If the thought of not reviewing code seems scary, let me remind you that checkpoints have moved before in software development. We moved from waterfall sign-offs to continuous integration. We can move them again.”

CodeReview

Shell Tricks That Actually Make Life Easier (And Save Your Sanity)

— Christian Hofstede-Kuhn

tl;dr: “Here are some tricks that aren’t exactly secret, but aren’t always taught either. To keep the peace in our extended Unix family, I’ve split these into two camps: the universal tricks that work on almost any POSIX-ish shell, and the quality-of-life additions specific to interactive shells like Bash or Zsh.”

Tips Shell

Null Pointer

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Most Popular From Last Issue

When Should A Manager Step In? - Charles-Axel Dein

Notable Links

Chandra: Models for document intelligence.

Claude Code Cheat Sheet: Shortcuts, commands, tips and more.

Claude HUD: Claude Code plugin that shows what's happening.

MLU-Explain: Visual explanations of core ML concepts.

Ziptable: Share small datasets as a link.

Tuesday 24th March issue is presented by Unblocked

Unblocked: Context That Saves You Time And Tokens

Stop babysitting your coding agents. Unblocked gives them the organizational knowledge to generate mergeable code without the back and forth.

It pulls context from across your engineering stack, resolves conflicts, and cuts the rework cycle by delivering only what agents need for the task at hand.

Try For Free Today

When Should A Manager Step In?

— Charles-Axel Dein

tl;dr: “Most management questions can be answered by "it depends" and "I know it when I see it". A couple of weeks ago a peer asked me "how do you know when to step in and give directions as a manager?" My first hunch was to reply "based on my experience (and many mistakes)”.”

Leadership Management

Willingness To Look Stupid Is A Genuine Moat In Creative Work

— Sharif Shameem

tl;dr: “It feels like there's something like a conservation law at work here: the amount of stupidity you're willing to tolerate is directly proportional to the quality of ideas you'll eventually produce.”

CareerAdvice

Your AI Agents Are Missing Context

— Dennis Pilarinos

tl;dr: Coding agents rarely produce mergeable code on the first try. Even with rules, skills, and MCP connections, you still end up babysitting each session, supplying missing context, fixing wrong assumptions, and burning tokens. What do we need to do to actually give AI tools the understanding they need?

Promoted by Unblocked

Tools Agents

AI ‘Aha' Team Meetings

— Lara Hogan

tl;dr: I spoke with a number of staff and principal engineers at various companies who are using AI daily to do their work, and are feeling pretty effective at it... My goal in interviewing them was to validate an idea I’ve been developing: that what teams might benefit from right now is a regular touchpoint with their team in which tips, tricks, and other “aha” moments about how their work is evolving are shared. I detail how to do this below!

Leadership Management

Interviewing Tactics For A Post-LLM World

— Dunya Kirkali

tl;dr: “The following three strategies transform the interview from a test of memory or raw problem-solving into an evaluation of how candidates leverage modern tools while applying genuine expertise.”

Leadership Management

Spec Driven Development With Agents

tl;dr: Are you still prompting one agent at a time? That's so 2025. Intent is a developer workspace for orchestrating multiple agents from a living spec. Go from idea to PR without juggling terminals, repo copies, or stale prompts. It's free with Claude Code / Codex / OpenCode.

Promoted by AugmentCode

Tools Agents

Every Layer Of Review Makes You 10x Slower

— Avery Pennarun

tl;dr: “I know what you're thinking. Come on, 10x? That’s a lot. It’s unfathomable. Surely we’re exaggerating. Nope. Just to be clear, we're counting “wall clock time” here rather than effort. Almost all the extra time is spent sitting and waiting.”

Management CodeReview

How Slack Rebuilt Notifications

— Shilpa Kannan, Frances Coronel

tl;dr: “Dozens of deep technical threads, many with 100+ replies, guided this project. These weren’t quick bug fixes but rather architecture decisions requiring tight alignment across product, design, frontend, backend, and mobile engineers.”

Architecture

Better, Faster, And (Even) More

— Michael Lopp

tl;dr: “I’ve never built more interesting, random, and useless scripts, tools, and services than I have in the last six months. The cost to go from “Random Thought” to “Working Something” has never been lower... The following is a set of tools and practices I’ve gathered over the last 90 days, which continue to accelerate my process and give me daily joy.”

Tools

Most Popular From Last Issue

The Future Of Software Engineering With Anthropic - Akash Bajwa

Notable Links

Browser Use: AI browser agent.

Electrobun: Build fast, tiny, cross-platform desktop apps.

Pentagi: Automated security testing.

TerminalUse: Infra for background agents.

TradingAgents: LLM financial trading framework.

Friday 20th March issue is presented by WorkOS

How To Test AI Agents That Never Produce the Same Output Twice

Same input. Same prompt. Different output. That's the reality of testing AI agents that write code, and most teams are shipping without solving it.

Nick Nisi from WorkOS tackled this by building eval systems for two AI tools:

• npx workos, a CLI agent that installs AuthKit into your project

• WorkOS agent skills that power LLM responses about SSO, directory sync, and RBAC.

The post covers how to test against real project structures, score output that's different every time, and catch when your agent makes up methods that don't exist.

Learn More About Evals →

Technical Leaders Make These 4 Common Storytelling Mistakes

— Wes Kao

tl;dr: (1) Over-reliance on technical details: Real-life is non-linear, but stories are linear. (2) Trying to remember too many tactics: Don’t try to remember a list of storytelling tips and strategies. (3) Too much backstory: Start right before you almost get eaten by a bear.(4) Trying to tell a story that’s too long.

Leadership Management

Exploit vs Explore

— Mike Fisher

tl;dr: “For leaders, this maps uncomfortably well to the way teams behave under pressure. When metrics are strong and customers are happy, exploration often feels like a luxury. When things are going poorly, it feels irresponsible. In both cases, the instinct is to exploit harder, to optimize the known, to squeeze more value out of the current system.”

Leadership Management

WorkOS FGA: The Authorization Layer For AI Agents

— Aaron Tainter, Pavan Kulkarni

tl;dr: Authentication proves an agent's identity. Authorization defines its blast radius. Most agents today inherit a user's full access token, turning a helpful assistant into a confused deputy that can leak production secrets to a shared Slack channel. This post digs into why that happens and how WorkOS FGA solves this by scoping the blast radius with resource-level permissions.

Promoted by WorkOS

Security Agents

The Future Of Software Engineering With Anthropic

— Akash Bajwa

tl;dr: A roundtable with Anthropic’s Ash Prabaker and engineering leaders from Stripe, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Google DeepMind, xAI, Apple, Scale AI, and Peter Steinberger explored how AI is reshaping software engineering - shifting workflows toward eval-driven development, agent-led coding, and new bottlenecks in long-horizon tasks, context, and regulation.

Leadership Management

Measuring Agents In Production

— Murat Demirbas

tl;dr: “This 2025 December paper, "Measuring Agents in Production", cuts through the reality behind the hype. It surveys 306 practitioners and conducts 20 in-depth case studies across 26 domains to document what is actually running in live environments. The reality is far more basic, constrained, and human-dependent.”

Productivity Agents

Scaling Postgres Connections With PgBouncer

— Ben Dicken

tl;dr: The Postgres process-per-connection model breaks down at scale. PgBouncer fixes this, but tuning it well is the hard part. This deep dive covers the three pooling modes, how to size your connection chain from max_client_conn down to max_connections, and real tuning examples for small, large, and single-tenant setups. Everything you need to configure PgBouncer with confidence.

Promoted by PlanetScale

PostgreSQL

The PERFECT Code Review: How to Reduce Cognitive Load While Improving Quality

— Daniil Bastrich

tl;dr: “I’ve distilled a healthy, sustainable review process into an acronym: PERFECT. It prioritizes what truly matters - from business logic and edge cases to reliability and readability - while keeping subjective opinions in check. Here is how you can apply these principles to bring structure, clarity, and consistency to your code reviews.”

CodeReview

Rob Pike's 5 Rules Of Programming

— Rob Pike

tl;dr: (1) You can't tell where a program is going to spend its time.(2) Measure before optimizing. (3) Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small. (4) Prefer simple algorithms and data structures. (5) Data dominates.

BestPractices

Lessons From Building Claude Code: How We Use Skills

— Thariq Shihipar

tl;dr: “A common misconception we hear about skills is that they are “just markdown files”, but the most interesting part of skills is that they’re not just text files. They’re folders that can include scripts, assets, data, etc. that the agent can discover, explore and manipulate. In Claude Code, skills also have a wide variety of configuration options including registering dynamic hooks.”

Agents

Null Pointer

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Most Popular From Last Issue

Slow Down To Speed Up - James Stanier

Notable Links

Claude HUD: Claude Code plugin that shows what's happening.

Cookbooks: Notebooks & recipes showcasing ways of using Claude.

Homarr: Modern and easy to use dashboard.

Impeccable: Design fluency for AI harnesses.

OpenDataLoader PDF: PDF Parser for AI-ready data.

Tuesday 17th March issue is presented by QA Wolf

✂️ Cut Your QA Cycles Down From Hours To Minutes With Automated Testing

If slow QA processes bottleneck your engineering team and slow down releases, you need QA Wolf.

Their AI-native service gets engineering teams to 80% automated E2E test coverage, helping them ship 5x faster by reducing QA cycles from hours to minutes.

With QA Wolf, you get:

• Unlimited parallel test runs for web and mobile

• 24-hour maintenance and on-demand test creation

• Human-verified bug reports sent directly to your team

• Zero flakes guarantee

Trusted by Drata, Cohere, AutoTrader, and many more.

Schedule A Demo To Learn More

Slow Down To Speed Up

— James Stanier

tl;dr: “We’ll explore when deliberate slowness pays off, including using AI itself for the slow work, and how fast prototyping is actually a form of slowing down. And finally, we’ll grapple with a question that’s getting harder to answer: why are you taking so long?”

Leadership Management

Management In The Age Of AI

tl;dr: (1) Managers must be builders. (2) Managers must expect more. (3) Managers must Manage budgets. (4) Goal clarity is non-negotiable. (5) Collaboration needs a forcing function. (6) Hire Like It Matters More Than Ever.

Leadership Management

Cut Your QA Cycles Down From Hours To Minutes With Automated Testing

tl;dr: If slow QA processes bottleneck your engineering team and slow down releases, you need QA Wolf. Their AI-native service gets engineering teams to 80% automated E2E test coverage, helping them ship 5x faster by reducing QA cycles from hours to minutes. With QA Wolf, you get: (1) Unlimited parallel test runs for web and mobile. (2) 24-hour maintenance and on-demand test creation. (3) Human-verified bug reports sent directly to your team. (4) Zero flakes guarantee. Trusted by Drata, Cohere, AutoTrader, and many more.

Promoted by QA Wolf

Tests Tools

How To Handle Overly Confident And Combative Colleagues

— Yue Zhao

tl;dr: “Working with this type of coworker is draining, mentally and emotionally. However, they are able to behave this way because they are in the good graces of senior leadership. This makes collaboration with them an unfortunate necessity. Here are some ways to tackle this situation.”

CareerAdvice

How The New York Times Is Scaling Unit Test Coverage Using AI Tools

— Eric Chima, Leonardo Quixada

tl;dr: “Our goal was to improve the reliability of our web app, but also to evaluate AI products and determine how far we could push them to do work in bulk across our codebase.”

Tests

When Everyone Becomes a Coder, Agents Need Better Context

— Simba Khadder, Yusuf Bahadur, Philip Laussermair

tl;dr: AI coding assistants are making it possible for anyone to build software, but agents often generate code using patterns from years ago. Trained on historical data, they miss newer Redis capabilities, improvise architectures, and don’t surface what they don’t know. Redis Agent Skills aim to close that gap.

Promoted by Redis

Agents

Yegge's Developer-Agent Evolution Model

— Justin Abrahms

tl;dr: “In Welcome to Gas Town , Steve Yegge generated a list of the 8 stages of agentic workflow evolution. I find myself wanting to deep link to it, so I’m replicating it here.”

CareerAdvice Agents

The Tech Behind Your 2025 Wrapped Highlights

— Yoshnee Raveendran

tl;dr: “For each eligible user, we identified up to five remarkable days from their 2025 listening history. We generated a personalized, LLM-generated “report” for each, essentially a creative narrative grounded entirely in real listening data. So how did we build it?”

Architecture

Managing Multiple Agents

— Jeff Foster

tl;dr: “Agent-driven AI programming is so 2025. This year, it’s all about co-ordinating multiple agents who work together as a team, with shared tasks, inter-agent messaging and centralized management. Armed with more than 200 years’ worth of management research, this post explains how different management styles work with agents.”

Agents

Most Popular From Last Issue

The Reason Most People Are Terrible Communicators (And How to Fix It) - Steve Huynh

Notable Event

Frontier Tech Week

Frontier Tech Week is Miami's premier technology week, bringing together developers, engineers, and innovators for an unforgettable experience. Join us for a week packed with two major conferences (AI Engineer Miami + React Miami), community events, a hackathon, and networking mixers.

Sign Up Now - Use code POINTER$50OFF to save $50

Notable Links

Lightpanda: Headless browser designed for AI and automation.

Oat: Ultra-lightweight UI library.

OneCLI: Secret vault for AI agents.

Open Terminal: A computer you can curl.

RCLI: Talk to your Mac, query your docs.

Friday 13th March issue is presented by PropelAuth

One Prompt. Complete Auth.

Design the perfect auth and onboarding experience for your users with PropelAuth's new Integration MCP Server. Pick and choose which features you need, and seamlessly match your product's look and feel.

Don't worry about auth: your agent can handle it while you work on your YC application.

Try PropelAuth Today

Ask Questions, Repeat The Hard Parts, And Listen

— Michael Lopp

tl;dr: “One of my least favorite moments as a leader, specifically your leader, is when you ask me to make the decision.” Michael shares three tactics he used to get you to decide.

Leadership Management

The Reason Most People Are Terrible Communicators (And How to Fix It)

— Steve Huynh

tl;dr: “I’m going to teach you three techniques that changed how I communicate at work. You can use them individually, but for the best results, you want to use all three together. And I’m going to use each technique to explain itself, so you can see them working in real time.”

CareerAdvice

One Prompt. Complete Auth.

tl;dr: Design the perfect auth and onboarding experience for your users with PropelAuth's new Integration MCP Server. Pick and choose which features you need, and seamlessly match your product's look and feel. Don't worry about auth: your agent can handle it while you work on your YC application.

Promoted by PropelAuth

Tools

The Structure Of Engineering Revolutions

— John Allsopp

tl;dr: “What we’re witnessing isn’t a tooling debate. It’s a paradigm shift, complete with anomaly denial, incommensurable worldviews, and paradigm defence mechanisms that have played out very similarly in every intellectual revolution Kuhn observed. Understanding this pattern won’t make the transition painless, but it might make it possible.”

Trends

Governance: Documentation As A Knowledge Network

— Frederick Vanbrabant

tl;dr: “I’ve done a lot of research about this over the years, and I would like to share my ideas on how to set up a documentation store. This is going to be a two part post. The first one is the general outline and philosophy. The second part is about structuring project governance documentation.”

Documentation

Deploy Production Agents With Confidence

tl;dr: Autonomous actors inside production systems pose risks that don’t trade off with speed. Securing them requires identity, not static secrets. Teleport’s Agentic Identity Framework establishes an architecture for deploying agents with cryptographic identity, access controls, and observability across infrastructure.

Promoted by Teleport

Agents

Things I've Done With AI

— Jerred Shepherd

tl;dr: “Effectively using AI required fundamental shift in how I thought about my projects. Why did I care about types? Why do we have design patterns? Why does code need to be maintainable or “well written”. For hobby projects, it can be a source of pleasure to write and see beautiful code.”

Tools CareerAdvice

Pushing And Pulling: Three Reactivity Algorithms

— Jonathan Frere

tl;dr: “It’s looking like I’m going to need to build a reactive engine for work, so I’m going to prepare for that by writing down what I know about them. I want to look at three ways of building reactive engines: push reactivity, pull reactivity, and the hybrid push/pull combination that is used in a bunch of web frameworks.”

Algo

The 8 Levels Of Agentic Engineering

— Bassim Eledath

tl;dr: “That gap doesn't close overnight. It closes in levels. 8 of them. Most of you reading this are likely past the first few, and you should be eager to reach the next one because each subsequent level is a huge leap in output, and every improvement in model capability amplifies those gains further.”

Agents

Null Pointer

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Most Popular From Last Issue

Managing Up - Michael Lopp

Notable Links

Claude Skills: 66 skills & 9 workflows.

Cmux: Ghostty-based macOS terminal.

Hindsight: Agent memory that learns.

Impeccable: Design fluency for AI harnesses.

Superpowers: Development workflow for coding agents.

Tuesday 10th March issue is presented by Unblocked

Unblocked: Save Time And Tokens With Better Context

Give Cursor, Claude, and Copilot the organizational knowledge they need to generate code that reflects how your system actually works.

Unblocked synthesizes your code, PR history, conversations, docs, and runtime signals to surface the right context for each task.

Try For Free Today

Managing Up

— Michael Lopp

tl;dr: “In this piece, I will explain the projects, people, and political developments you always want to share — no matter what. While I will strive to make this complete, there is one type of development you must always report.”

Leadership Management CareerAdvice

Avoiding A Culture Of Emergencies

tl;dr: “As you would expect, better managers have fewer emergencies, and worse managers have more. And at the extremes, it’s common to find that the best managers basically never have preventable emergencies, and the worst managers have teams which are constantly in a state of emergency, to the point that they’re 100% reactive.”

Leadership Management

Information ≠ Context For Your AI Agents

— Dennis Pilarinos

tl;dr: AI coding tools are fast, capable, and completely context-blind. Even with rules, skills, and MCP connections, they generate code that misses your conventions, ignores past decisions, and breaks patterns. You end up paying for that gap in rework and tokens. What do we need to do to actually give AI tools the understanding they need?

Promoted by Unblocked

Agents Tools

GenAI As Your 24/7 Leadership Advisor, Chief Of Staff, And Coach

— Nick Zylkowski

tl;dr: “I’ve spent the past several months building AI advisors for both work and personal contexts. I use them daily to speed up research, bounce ideas, challenge my decisions, and identify patterns I should work on to step up as a leader.”

Leadership Management

Architectural Lessons From Sub-100-ms APIs

— Saranya Vedagiri

tl;dr: “The heart of this article is simple: low latency isn’t an optimization - it’s a design outcome. It emerges from the choices we make about data locality, async vs. sync flows, cache boundaries, error isolation, and observability. Achieving sub-100 ms is possible for many systems, but sustaining it under load takes alignment across engineering, product, and operations.”

Architecture API

75% Of Developers Believe AI Reduces Toil — But The Data Suggests A New Reality

tl;dr: There is a new "velocity tax" in software development. As AI adoption grows, your teams aren't necessarily working less — they are spending 25% of their week fixing and securing AI-generated code. This hidden cost creates a verification bottleneck that stalls innovation. Sonar provides the automated, trusted analysis needed to bridge the gap between AI speed and production-grade quality.

Promoted by Sonar

Tools Productivity

Zen Of AI Coding

— Yoav Aviram

tl;dr: “Dedicated to all those who are sceptical about the significance of agentic coding, and to those who are not, and are wondering what it means for the future of their profession.“

Tools Productivity

How I Run 4–8 Parallel Coding Agents With tmux and Markdown Specs

— Manuel Schipper

tl;dr: “I’ve been running parallel coding agents with a lightweight setup for a few months now with tmux, Markdown files, bash aliases, and six slash commands. These are vanilla agents - no subagent profiles or orchestrators, but I do use a role naming convention per tmux window.”

Agents

Can AI Agents Build Real Stripe Integrations? We Built A Benchmark To Find Out

— Kevin Ho, Carol Liang

tl;dr: “We wanted to answer this question: can agents autonomously build complete Stripe integrations? When it comes to businesses running on Stripe, a mostly correct integration is a failure; payments require 100% accuracy. What matters is not just an agent’s ability to generate code, but its capacity to verify, test, and validate that code with the rigor of a human engineer.”

Tests

Most Popular From Last Issue

Reflections On The Future Of Software Engineering Retreat - Rachel Laycock

Notable Links

Agency: A complete agency of AI specialists.

Electrobun: Build fast, tiny, cross-platform desktop apps.

Hermes Agent: Agent that grows with you.

Open Terminal: A computer you can curl.

Page Agent: In-page GUI agent.

Friday 6th March issue is presented by WorkOS

Go From “We Don't Support SSO" To Enterprise Ready In A Weekend

Every B2B company hits the same inflection point — enterprise customers show up and they need SSO, directory sync, audit logs, and role-based access before they'll move forward. Most teams lose months building that infrastructure. It doesn't have to be that way.

With WorkOS you get all of it. One platform for auth, identity, and security. Infrastructure for teams that ship fast and stay fast.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Perplexity already chose WorkOS over building it themselves.

Build Faster With WorkOS →

Reflections On The Future Of Software Engineering Retreat

— Rachel Laycock

tl;dr: (1) The need to address cognitive load. (2) The staff engineer role is changing. (3) Testing and code reviews. (4) Agent topologies. (5) Programming languages. (6) Self-healing systems.

Leadership Management

How To Instantly Be Better At Things

— Cate Hall

tl;dr: “It’s a funny quirk of the human condition that sometimes simply asking, of a given task, “how would someone much, much better than me approach this?” immediately makes you better at it. Like, right away.”

CareerAdvice

npx workos: An AI Agent That Writes Auth Into Your Codebase

tl;dr: The WorkOS agent reads your project, detects your framework, and writes a complete auth integration into your existing codebase. It then typechecks, builds, and self-corrects any errors. Just run npx workos.

Promoted by WorkOS

Tools

Six Rules For Designing Company Goals

— Molly Graham

tl;dr: Here are six rules: (1) No company needs more than three company goals. (2) One goal needs to win in a fight. (3) Explain it to me like i’m five. (4) Strategy should hurt. (5) One goal. One owner. (6) Goals alone are not enough.

Leadership Management

Nobody Gets Promoted For Simplicity

— Matheus Lima

tl;dr: “Complexity looks smart. Not because it is, but because our systems are set up to reward it. And the incentive problem doesn’t start at promotion time. It starts before you even get the job.”

CareerAdvice

Legacy CI Is Too Slow For The Speed Of AI

— Kyle Galbraith

tl;dr: When you can generate a feature in 20 minutes, a 20-minute CI pipeline is unacceptable. Depot’s Co-founder & CEO Kyle Galbraith on why infra is the new bottleneck for AI-driven teams and what engineering leaders must do to adapt.

Promoted by Depot

Architecture AI

Design-First Collaboration

— Rahul Garg

tl;dr: “AI coding assistants default to generating implementation immediately — embedding design decisions invisibly in the output. I propose a structured conversation pattern that mirrors whiteboarding with a human pair: progressive levels of design alignment before any code, reducing cognitive load and catching misunderstandings at the cheapest possible moment.”

AI BestPractices

AI Fatigue Is Real And Nobody Talks About It

— Siddhant Khare

tl;dr: “This is a fundamentally different kind of work. Creating is energizing. Reviewing is draining. There's research on this - the psychological difference between generative tasks and evaluative tasks. Generative work gives you flow states. Evaluative work gives you decision fatigue.”

AI

The Two Kinds Of Error

— Evan Hahn

tl;dr: “In my mind, errors are divided into two categories. Expected errors (think “user entered invalid data”), which are part of normal operation, aren’t the developer’s fault, and should be handled. Unexpected errors (think “null pointer exception”) are the developer’s fault, likely indicate a bug, and are allowed to crash.”

BestPractices

Null Pointer

Hand-drawn by Manu. Got an idea for a cartoon? Click reply and let us know

Most Popular From Last Issue

Engineering Productivity In 2026: Where AI Actually Pays Off - Anna Shipman

Notable Links

CLI: One tool for all of Google Workspace.

Emdash: OS agentic development environment.

Ruflo: AI orchestration platform.

Shannon: Autonomous AI pentester for webapps and APIs.

Superset: IDE for the AI agents era.

March 3rd February issue is presented by Atono

Predictable Planning Across Product Teams

Planning gets messy when different teams work in different ways. One team runs sprints, another uses Kanban – leadership still needs to know what’s shipping next quarter.

Atono’s Product Methodology Survival Guide shares how they made cross-team planning predictable without forcing everyone into the same process.

Inside the guide:

• A decision framework for team autonomy vs. constraints

• A cross-team planning checklist that works across methodologies

• Real examples from PagerDuty, La Redoute, and Atono

If you’re responsible for delivery across multiple teams, this is a practical approach to keeping planning grounded in reality instead of rituals.

Download The Guide

Engineering Productivity In 2026: Where AI Actually Pays Off

— Anna Shipman

tl;dr: “Earlier this week I was on a panel with some excellent peers discussing AI and engineering productivity. We discussed how to measure engineering productivity; tactics for driving adoption; how this might change how we structure our teams and the impact on junior engineers, among other topics. Here are my notes.”

Leadership Management

Strategic Choices: When Both Options Are Good

— Jason Cohen

tl;dr: “Great strategies include strategic choices having these properties: (1) Real decisions: Chooses A over B even though B is also desirable. (2) Accepts consequences: Chooses A and all of A’s consequences, including the unfortunate ones. (3) Reinforces each other: A set of choices that reinforce each other, rather than choices that are smart in isolation but conflict together.”

Leadership Management

Why Your Team Is Slower Than Last Year

— Troy McAlpin

tl;dr: Code changes that took two hours last year now take two days. It’s not effort. It’s not headcount. As software systems mature, the reasoning behind key decisions gets buried in old tickets, Slack threads, and people who’ve moved on. Every hard question funnels through the same few engineers. AI speeds up individuals, but without shared product context, teams drift. Here’s why velocity erodes in established systems.

Promoted by Atono

Leadership Management

How We Hire Engineers When AI Writes Our Code

— Dan Federman

tl;dr: “But make no mistake-even if you aren't writing the code, you own the output. I want to see how you approach the problem, how you structure a solution, how you think through constraints, and how you decide what actually matters.”

Management Hiring

Mechanical Habits

— Alex Kladov

tl;dr: “My schtick as a software engineer is establishing automated processes — mechanically enforced patterns of behavior. I have collected a Santa Claus bag of specific tricks I’ve learned from different people, and want to share them in turn.”

Productivity CareerAdvice

Continuous Coordination For AI-First Engineering Teams

tl;dr: Vibe coding and agent orchestration are making engineers wildly productive. But throughput without alignment is organized chaos. The faster your team ships, the more critical it is for everyone to know what’s happening, why it matters, and what's coming next. Steady’s Continuous Coordination guide lays out 7 principles any team can adopt to remove coordination bottlenecks.

Promoted by Steady

Guide AI

Data vs Hype: How Orgs Actually Win With AI

— Laura Tacho

tl;dr: “What is happening in our organizations, what you can expect to happen and how agents are changing the game.”

Leadership Management Video

Agentic Engineering Patterns

— Simon Willison

tl;dr: “I’ve started a new project to collect and document Agentic Engineering Patterns - coding practices and patterns to help get the best results out of this new era of coding agent development we find ourselves entering.”

Agents AI

An Interactive Intro To Quadtrees

tl;dr: “Suppose you're building a map application. You have millions of restaurants, gas stations, and landmarks, each with a latitude and longitude. A user taps the screen and asks: "What's near me?"

SystemDesign

Most Popular From Last Issue

How I Use Claude Code - Boris Tane

Notable Links

Claude Skills: 66 skills & 9 workflows.

Cmux: Ghostty-based macOS terminal.

Markitdown: Convert files and office documents to Markdown.

Microgpt: LLM visualizer.

Superset: IDE for the AI agents era.