- Pointer
- Posts
- Issue #652
Issue #652
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 23rd September’s issue is presented by WorkOS
The MCP Registry helps LLMs discover tools, but discovery alone isn’t enough. Tools still need to act on behalf of users, and that requires secure, delegated access. API keys don’t cut it.
WorkOS Connect delivers a compliant OAuth 2.1 flow with PKCE, scopes, user consent, and token issuance - so you can ship secure integrations faster.
— Bjorn Roche
tl;dr: “When managing a growing organization, it can be useful to have certain document templates on hand. Here’s a collection of documents I find useful, along with some notes on how to use them, and a link to a template if I’ve got one. Obviously, you should tweak these for what makes sense for you and your organization.”
Leadership Management
— Srihari Sriraman
tl;dr: “In this post, I propose a structure for this operational exercise that lasts 2-4 hours, every month or quarter. I see quality as solving for the Pareto front with the tangible dimensions of reliability, performance, cost, delivery and security, and the more intangible dimensions of simplicity and social structures. For each dimension, go through the list of questions below and try to answer them together.“
Leadership Management
— Zack Proser
tl;dr: Most AI apps never make it past the prototype phase. The teams that succeed follow clear patterns: invest early in access control, auditability, and identity integration. This guide shows how they move fast without cutting corners, using enterprise features like SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and Audit Logs enabled by WorkOS APIs and tools.
Promoted by WorkOS
Management AI
— Anton Iokov
tl;dr: “We are now hiring for a peculiar role of Educator and have received 107 applications. We didn’t hire a recruiter (on purpose), so I’ve read all of them. One thing stood out. Our application form consists of three questions: (1) Why are you a good fit? (2) Why aren’t you a good fit? (3) Any questions for us? Surprisingly enough, the question that helps to spot our potential matches the most is the second one — why aren’t you a good fit? Turns out, very few people can answer this question in a thoughtful, sincere, and empathetic way.”
Management Hiring
“I’ve finally learned what ‘upward compatible’ means. It means we get to keep all our old mistakes.”
— Allan Reyes
tl;dr: “This post is about how to keep secrets out of logs, and my claim is that (like many things in security) there isn’t a singular action or silver bullet that lets you do this. I would go so far as to say that there’s not even an 80/20 rule, where one action fixes 80% of the problem. It’s not like preventing SQL injection with prepared statements or preventing buffer overflows by using memory-safe languages.”
Logging
— Julia McClellan
tl;dr: Since launching on July 30, developers have used Augment Code’s Easy MCP to quickly connect their agents with essential context providers. Augment is excited to announce four new integrations: Honeycomb, Render, Vercel, and Heroku. When Augment has the full context of the tools you use to build and run software - observability, deployment, hosting, and infrastructure - it can help you do even more.
Promoted by Augment Code
Tools AI
— Bret Victor
tl;dr: “Many important computer pioneers and successful people of all sorts have a singular passion. This passion doesn't have to be a beautiful thing you want to bring into the world; it can be and often is an injustice to be stamped out. Victor's own vision is of a world where ideas can be manifested at the speed of thought. Indeed, unless this world is created, thoughts will continue to be lost and wasted before they can find persistent form in the world.”
CareerAdvice Video
tl;dr: “Hallucinations persist partly because current evaluation methods set the wrong incentives. While evaluations themselves do not directly cause hallucinations, most evaluations measure model performance in a way that encourages guessing rather than honesty about uncertainty.”
LLM AI
— Moncef Abboud
tl;dr: “What is compression? We represent data using bytes (1 byte = 8 bits). The more bits we have, the more storage space we need and the longer the transmission time. If we can represent some data with fewer bits, we can save on both storage and time it takes to process or transmit. So compression translates to cost savings and better performance. And at scale, we are talking about millions of $.”
DeepDive Algo
Most Popular From Last Issue
Notable Links
500 AI Agents: Curated collection of use cases across industries.
Cachey: Read-through cache for object storage.
Perplexica: AI-powered search engine.
SQLiteData: Lightweight replacement for SwiftData.
Stagewise: Frontend coding agent for production.
How did you like this issue of Pointer?1 = Didn't enjoy it all // 5 = Really enjoyed it |