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- Issue #647
Issue #647
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 5th September’s issue is presented by Augment Code
You ship to production; vibes won’t cut it. Augment Code's powerful AI coding agent meets professional developers exactly where they are, delivering deep context into even the gnarliest codebases and learning how you work.
Augment Code lets you:
Index and navigate millions of lines of code
Get instant answers about any part of your codebase
Build with the AI agent that gets you, your team, and your code
— Mike Fisher
tl;dr: “So here’s the call to action for you: pick a problem you’re wrestling with, something murky or complex, and reach for a handrail. Apply a familiar framework or create your own. Sketch it. Test it. See how it shapes your clarity. And then, next time you find yourself in unfamiliar terrain, don’t panic. Look for structure. Reach for a handrail. Build one if it doesn’t exist. The act of framing may be the most powerful thinking tool we have.”
Leadership Management
— Suresh Choudhary
tl;dr: “Inside my head, the voice of my insecurity was buzzing: “I’m not as experienced as they are. I’m not as knowledgeable. What if they question my authority? How can I manage someone who clearly knows more than me? What could I possibly teach them?” If you’ve ever felt like that, now you know you’re not alone. Over time, I learned how to manage (and learn from) these highly experienced engineers by fixing the mistakes I was making.”
Leadership Management
— Andre Chang
tl;dr: Manual ticket management at scale is time consuming and inconsistent, taking engineering time away from solving actual problems. Learn how Augment Code leveraged Auggie, its new CLI coding agent, to create a three-agent pipeline of specialized AI agents to automate labelling, support, and triage capabilities.
Promoted by Augment Code
Management AI
— Wes Kao
tl;dr: “I appreciate the sentiment, which is meant to help empower people to set boundaries. I’m all for setting boundaries. But I find a lot of advice around this topic is too black and white, and I’m afraid people will take the advice literally and get themselves into trouble. Straight up saying “no” might work in some settings, but in my experience, it can sound too harsh in many workplace cultures.”
CareerAdvice
“Every job looks easy when you’re not the one doing it.”
— Mike Judge
tl;dr: “I’d take a task and I’d estimate how long it would take to code if I were doing it by hand, and then I’d flip a coin, heads I’d use AI, and tails I’d just do it myself. Then I’d record when I started and when I ended. That would give me the delta, and I could use the delta to build AI vs no AI charts, and I’d see some trends. I ran that for six weeks, recording all that data, and do you know what I discovered?”
ThoughtPiece AI
— George Hastings
tl;dr: As AI agents start actually working, a lot of discussion around “generative UI” and how user experiences will change. Will MCP embed all apps into ChatGPT? Will ChatGPT embed in every app? Coherence shares thoughts from Head of Product George Hastings.
Promoted by Coherence
AI
— Simon Stewart
tl;dr: “Googlers like to make decisions based on data, rather than just relying on gut instinct or something that can’t be measured and assessed. Over time we’ve come to agree on a set of data-driven naming conventions for our tests. We call them “Small”, “Medium” and “Large” tests.“
Tests
— Ryan Persaud, Nathan Lehotsky
tl;dr: “A new proactive defence mechanism inside Slack. By combining real-time monitoring with advanced analytics, AER autonomously identifies high-confidence threat actor behaviours as they emerge on our platform. When suspicious activity is detected, the system automatically terminates the associated user sessions, reducing the security detection and response gap from potential days / hours to mere minutes.“
Architecture Security
— Sean Goedecke
tl;dr: “Thinking in terms of legibility and illegibility explains so many of the things that are confusing about large software companies. It explains why companies do many things that seem obviously counter-productive, why the rules in practice are so often out of sync with the rules as written, and why companies are surprisingly willing to tolerate rule-breaking in some contexts.”
Management
Null Pointer
Grok To The Rescue
Hand Drawn by Manu
Most Popular From Last Issue
I Sat Down With Werner Vogels - Everton Marcelino
Notable Links
Bytebot: OS AI Desktop Agent.
Email.wtf: Decide if each email address is valid or not.
FossFLOW: Isometric diagramming tool.
Sim: OS Platform to build & deploy AI agent workflows.
Termix: Web-based server management platform.
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