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- Issue #653
Issue #653
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 26rd September’s issue is presented by Coherence
Analytics: "Users dropped 47% at checkout". You: "But... why?". Analytics: shrugs
Coherence fixes this. Give users a link, our AI agent conducts smart interviews based on your research goals, you get real insights.
It's like having a UX researcher who never sleeps and actually talks to users. Ship features they want, not what you think they want.
Because console.log(user.thoughts) isn't a real API... yet. Stop guessing, start understanding.
— 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
— Mike Fisher
tl;dr: “Here’s the core idea: in uncertainty, leadership is less about accurate prediction and more about durable intent. You won’t make the fog go away, you’ll make it navigable. The quickest way to lose a team in ambiguity is to substitute activity for agreement, or to mistake head-nods for shared understanding. If you pulled the timeline slide out of your deck, would your team still know what you’re trying to accomplish, and why now?”
Leadership Management
tl;dr: Let's be honest - you're not talking to enough users. Nobody is. Even teams with dedicated researchers struggle to capture in-the-moment feedback at scale, and most teams don't have a researcher at all. Coherence fixes this. It's an AI-powered research platform that conducts real conversations with your users, learns from their experiences, and synthesizes insights across hundreds of interactions.
Promoted by Coherence
Management AI
— Andrew Bosworth
tl;dr: “I often find myself helping people navigate interpersonal tension. I might hear from Alice about something that happened with Bob that upset her. It is important that Alice and Bob be able to work together so I need to help get things back on the right track.” Andrew discusses his approach to reconciliation.
Leadership Management
“Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.”
— Bill Mill
tl;dr: “One of the tasks that I do most often is to review code. I've written a review command that asks an AI to review a code sample, and I've gotten a lot of value out of it. I ignore most of the suggestions that the tool outputs, but it has already saved me often enough from painful errors that I wanted to share it in the hope that others might find it useful.”
Tools AI
— Anmol Baranwal
tl;dr: Most AI apps today are chat-based, which is highly limiting. With 83% of users preferring interactive interfaces, there’s a clear need for smarter AI experiences. Generative UI works on top of LLMs to generate adaptive, context-aware interfaces at runtime based on user intent. This blog explains what GenUI means for AI-first products, the tools to get started, and how it all fits together.
Promoted by Thesys
AI
— Gergely Orosz
tl;dr: “I learned how Claude Code is built, and got insights into how a successful “AI-first engineering team” operates; it was a bit like a peek into a crystal ball and a potential future of how fast-moving startups will operate. The good news is that software engineers appear very much in demand in it…”
DeepDive
— Birgitta Böckeler
tl;dr: “The discourse about to what level AI-generated code should be reviewed often feels very binary. Is vibe coding (i.e. letting AI generate code without looking at the code) good or bad? The answer is of course neither, because “it depends”. So what does it depend on?”
AI
tl;dr: “Muse’s ultimate goal is to help Netflix members discover content they’ll love by ensuring our promotional media is as effective and authentic as possible. It achieves this by equipping creative strategists and launch managers with data-driven insights showing which artwork or video clips resonate best with global or regional audiences and flagging outliers such as potentially misleading assets.” This post discusses the steps taken to evolve Muse to enable new capabilities while maintaining high performance and data accuracy.
Architecture
Null Pointer
“Legacy Code,” hand-drawn by Manu
Most Popular From Last Issue
Useful Engineering Management Artifacts - Bjorn Roche
Notable Links
Claude-Flow: AI orchestration platform.
Gin: High-performance HTTP web framework.
House Of Evil: Your reflection awaits.
Vibe Coding: Tips and tricks.
WebGoat: Deliberately insecure WebApp to teach security.
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