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- Issue #662
Issue #662
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 27th October 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:
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Build with the AI agent that gets you, your team, and your code
— Lizzie Matusov
tl;dr: “Raw numbers without context provide limited value. A team deploying weekly might be performing exceptionally well in a highly regulated industry, or significantly underperforming in a cloud-native startup. Understanding the distribution of performance across the industry - where the top performers cluster, where the median falls, and what constitutes foundational challenges - enables leaders to set realistic improvement targets and identify whether their constraints are technical, organizational, or process-driven.”
Leadership Management
— Sean Goedecke
tl;dr: “In the last two years, code review has gotten much more important. Code is now easy to generate using LLMs, but it’s still just as hard to review1. Many software engineers now spend as much (or more) time reviewing the output of their own AI tools than their colleagues’ code. I think a lot of engineers don’t do code review correctly. Of course, there are lots of different ways to do code review, so this is largely a statement of my engineering taste.”
CareerAdvice
— Molisha Shah
tl;dr: Augment Code runs multiple frontier models side by side in production creating a unique vantage point into how models behave in real coding workflows. Usage patterns suggest developers are done chasing the newest model; they are matching models to specific task profiles. Data from millions of live interactions reveals more about model adoption, behavioral differences, and system-level trade-offs.
Promoted by Augment Code
Tools AI
— Eugene Yan
tl;dr: “What makes an effective principal engineer or scientist? Here, I’ve distilled what I’ve observed from role models and quoted some of their advice below. While my perspective is naturally Amazon-centric, these ideas should also apply to most principal tech IC roles. As always, use your best judgment and assess if this advice applies to you and your situation.”
Leadership Management
“The function of good software is to make the complex appear to be simple.”
— Tawanda Munongo
tl;dr: “I have seen the same trend in my own work patterns. This increase in work is not necessarily in the sense of being busier because there's more work to do. Instead, it manifests as a psychological compulsion to keep going. The very existence of these hyper-capable tools seems to have created a new kind of pressure, an existential duty to keep working, to keep driving the machine that never sleeps.”
ThoughtPiece AI
tl;dr: "Stop compromising between velocity and governance: Join Shashank Awasthi (Postman) and Allen Helton (Momento) for an exclusive fireside chat on Thursday, Nov 6, 2025 (10am PST / 1pm EST / 6pm GMT), to get strategic guidance on structuring your SDLC to deliver APIs that are consistent, compliant, and enterprise-ready. Register Now.
Promoted by Postman
API Events
— Nanda Syahrasyad
tl;dr: “A couple of months ago, I shipped Playground — a web-based JavaScript debugger that lets you write JS code and attach breakpoints using the debugger statement. It was the first personal project that I saw through to completion, and it was an incredible opportunity for me to dip my toes in web technologies I've never used before. I learned a ton, and in the next little bit, I want to talk about how exactly it works. In the process, we're going to build our own mini-debugger using Babel's plugin APIs. Let's get started!”
Debugging Guide
— Andrew Healey
tl;dr: “Pips is The New York Times' daily puzzle where you have to place dominos onto a board within a set of region restrictions. I wrote a solver for Pips by encoding the game logic and searching through a tree of legal game states until a complete board is found, along with optimizations to make it ~16× more efficient than a brute-force search. I built a UI to help me debug my solver which you can see running below.”
DataVisualization Guide
— Josh Moody
tl;dr: ‘Dana. The interviewer. Friendly, efficient. She leans forward.“So,” she says, “walk me through FizzBuzz.” You could do this in your sleep. “Is JavaScript okay?” She nods. You open your laptop and begin…’
Entertaining
Most Popular From Last Issue
Measuring Engineering Productivity - Can Duruk
Notable Links
Ladybird: Truly independent web browser.
MinIO: High-performance, S3-compatible object storage solution.
Oxdraw: Diagram as code tool.
Public APIs: Collective list of free APIs.
UT: CLI utility toolkit.
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