Issue #601

Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders

March 25th, 2025

Tuesday 25th March’s issue is presented by Augment Code

Most coding AI struggles with complex codebases. Not Augment Code.

Augment is the only AI coding assistant that:

Trusted by engineering teams at Datastax, Lemonade, GoFundMe and Kong to tame complexity and maintain flow.

— Ben Kuhn

tl;dr: “Recently I’ve been having a lot of conversations about how to structure and staff teams. One framework I’ve referenced repeatedly is to break down team leadership into a few different categories of responsibility.” Ben shares what these are and why he finds it useful.

Leadership Management

— Will Larson

tl;dr: “I refer to the art of making policies work as “operations” or “strategy operations.” The good news is that effectively operating a policy is two-thirds avoiding common practices that simply don’t work. The other one-third takes some practice, but can be practiced in any engineering role: there’s no need to wait until you’re an executive to start building mastery. This chapter will dig into those mechanisms.”

Leadership Management

— Arun Chaganty, Vinay Perneti

tl;dr: Augment's "Next Edit" feature uses AI to predict code changes needed across a codebase when developers make edits. When initial testing revealed UX and model behavior issues, the team faced a choice: fork VS Code or redesign within its constraints. They chose the harder path of working within VS Code's API, refining their three-model approach to be less intrusive yet helpful.

Promoted by Augment Code

Management Tools

— Lionel Dricot

tl;dr: “The root problem is that, for the first time in human history, our brain is the bottleneck. For all history, transmitting information was slow. Brains were fast. After sending a letter, we had days or months to think before receiving an answer.”

ThoughtPiece

“You haven’t mastered a tool until you understand when it should not be used.”

— Kelsey Hightower

— Steve Yegge

tl;dr: Steve describes six waves of coding: traditional, completions, chat-based, coding agents, agent clusters, and agent fleets. While "vibe coding" goes viral, it's already being surpassed by coding agents that work independently with minimal supervision. Companies must budget for significant LLM costs or risk falling behind. Junior developers are adapting faster than seniors, gaining an advantage in this new landscape.

ThoughtPiece AI

— Zack Proser

tl;dr: The evolution from smart chatbots to digital assistants capable of autonomously performing multi-step tasks such as ordering groceries, scraping job postings, or researching and filling our complex web forms is natural. However, these expanded capabilities carry significant authentication, security, and compliance ramifications. This article explores these issues and discusses the emerging ecosystem around computer-using operators.

Promoted by WorkOS

Security AI

— Charles Covey-Brandt

tl;dr: “In this blog post, we’ll highlight the unique challenges we faced migrating from Enzyme to RTL, how LLMs excel at solving this particular type of challenge, and how we structured our migration tooling to run an LLM-driven migration at scale.”

Tests

— Jordan Wood

tl;dr: “With roughly 30k unit tests and nearly 1k iOS end-to-end tests, speeding up our E2E suite has become a top priority as it takes a substantial amount of time to run. In this post, we’ll highlight how we sped up our tests by 50% with a small, targeted change.”

Tests iOS

— Hillel Wayne

tl;dr: Hillel presents a JavaScript puzzle and asks readers to predict the output, highlighting unexpected and quirky behavior.

JavaScript

Anubis: Verifies incoming HTTP requests to stop AI crawlers.

CodeViz: Visualize & navigate your codebase.

Requestly: HTTP Interceptor for browsers.

Manifest: The 1-file micro-backend.

TTYD: Share your terminal over the web.


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