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- Issue #663
Issue #663
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 31st October issue is presented by Unblocked
Unblocked makes the scattered knowledge in your code, docs, and discussions discoverable in your daily workflows, so you and your team get trusted answers, contextual code reviews, and production-ready AI code.
— 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
— James Stanier
tl;dr: “We’re going to go further this week and think about how we can expand our usage of a thinking partner into multiple thinking partners by using LLM agents to create your own councils that you can use to accelerate and supercharge your thinking and also simulate situations where many actors may not have default consensus on issues.”
Leadership Management AI
— Dennis Pilarinos
tl;dr: AI coding agents can’t solve real engineering problems with prompts alone — it needs institutional knowledge. Context engineering puts together the right mix of your code, docs, tickets, and conversations so AI generates code that works in your system.
Promoted by Unblocked
LLM
— Cate Hall
tl;dr: “The most dangerous people have an exquisitely tuned sense of just how much they can get away with when it comes to how they treat different people, so pay special attention when others have sharply diverging experiences of someone’s character. Lots of variance in opinion about whether an idea is good means there’s a good chance the idea is good; lots of variance in opinion about whether a person is good is a warning sign.”
CareerAdvice
“I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.”
— Joe Magerramov
tl;dr: “I think we are seeing early signs that agentic coding can change the calculus here. AI agents are great at spitting out large volumes of code, especially when the desired behavior is well known and there's little ambiguity. Ideas that were sound in principle, but too expensive to implement and maintain just had their costs decrease by an order of magnitude. I really love riding such shifts in the industry, because they open the doors to new approaches that weren't practical in the past.”
Trends AI
— Antonija Bilic
tl;dr: AI tools boosted individual developer speed but left teams fragmented and inconsistent. Aviator Runbooks solves this with spec-driven, multiplayer AI coding—shared sessions where teams plan, code, and learn together. The result: reusable specs, consistent outcomes, and AI that scales from solo productivity to team collaboration.
Promoted by Aviator Runbooks
Tools AI
— David Teller
tl;dr: “Ranking by order in which I discovered these languages. In most cases, I’m going to attach features to languages that were not the first language to have such features. It’s not meant to be a misattribution, just to showcase how I was exposed to such features.”
LanguageDesign
— Korny Sietsma
tl;dr: “The fundamental security weakness of LLMs is that there is no rigorous way to separate instructions from data, so anything they read is potentially an instruction. This leads to the “Lethal Trifecta”: sensitive data, untrusted content, and external communication - the risk that the LLM will read hidden instructions that leak sensitive data to attackers. We need to take explicit steps to mitigate this risk by minimizing access to each of these three elements.”
Security AI
— Josh Moody
tl;dr: “Four decades ago, the first domain was registered and the initial batch of top-level domains came to be. Nearly a billion domains have been registered since then. Let’s take a tour of domain milestones over the last forty years...and ask what comes next.”
Domains
Null Pointer
Gotcha
Hand drawn by Manu
Most Popular From Last Issue
Mistakes I See Engineers Making In Their Code Reviews - Sean Goedecke
Notable Links
Amplifier: Supercharged AI dev environment.
Butter: A cache for your LLM.
GeoUtil: All-in-one online geography toolkit.
Hoppscotch: OS API development ecosystem.
Slidev: Presentation slides for developers.
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