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- Issue #671
Issue #671
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 2nd December issue is presented by WorkOS
Free trials help AI apps grow, but bots and fake accounts exploit them. They steal tokens, burn compute, and disrupt real users.
Cursor, the fast-growing AI code assistant, uses WorkOS Radar to detect and stop abuse in real time. With device fingerprinting and behavioral signals, Radar blocks fraud before it reaches your app.
— Matheus Lima
tl;dr: “People love to describe senior engineers with a big checklist: architecture, communication, ownership, leadership, etc. But if you strip away the title, the salary, and the years of experience, there’s one core skill that separates senior+ engineers from everyone else: reducing ambiguity. Everything else flows from that.”
Leadership Management
tl;dr: “If you are a senior engineer or PM or designer, you should own a graph. One of the quickest ways to get better at your job is to own a graph. There are many ways to do work that don’t matter and there are many ways to do work that matters but fail to articulate that value well. Owning a graph solves both of these problems.”
Leadership Management
— Zack Proser
tl;dr: Most enterprise AI agents fail before production due to complex architectures, no evaluation framework, and poor security. This playbook shares five proven patterns from real deployments and explains how secure agent authorization with WorkOS using OAuth 2.1 helps teams get agents safely into production.
Promoted by WorkOS
Guide Agents
— Mike Fisher
tl;dr: “For individuals, it looks like this: you start your career exploring, learning, trying everything. Then success hits, and suddenly you’re the “expert.” The system rewards consistency, not curiosity. You stop tinkering, because tinkering feels risky when you’re at the top. That’s how comfort becomes constraint.”
CareerAdvice
"Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master”
— Werner Vogels
tl;dr: “In the coming year, we will begin the transition into a new era of AI in the human loop, not the other way around. This cycle will create massive opportunities to solve problems that truly matter. And it starts by addressing one of the unintended consequences of our hyperconnected world—loneliness and a lack of companionship - by turning the very force that created the problem into the solution.”
Trends
— Brian Morrison
tl;dr: B2B users expect team workspaces, not just personal accounts. This guide shows you how to add secure multi-tenancy with Clerk, Lovable, and Supabase. Complete with organization switching, invites, and scoped data access. No manual JWT parsing required.
Guide
— Marc Gauthier
tl;dr: “Post mortems can be a daunting process to setup for software teams. What metrics to track? How to run the various meetings? What should be the resulting documentation? How do you even track followup actions? There is a ton of literature out there and it’s hard to know what is actually relevant.”
Leadership Management Postmortem
— Matthew Frail, Kyle Petroski
tl;dr: “LLMs are stateless functions. Their weights are frozen by the time they're used for inference, so they don't learn over time. The only thing that the model knows about your codebase is the tokens you put into it. Similarly, coding agent harnesses such as Claude Code usually require you to manage agents' memory explicitly. CLAUDE.md (or AGENTS.md) is the only file that by default goes into every single conversation you have with the agent.”
BestPractices AI
— William Woodruff
tl;dr: “Dependency cooldowns are a free, easy, and incredibly effective way to mitigate the large majority of open source supply chain attacks. More individual projects should apply cooldowns to their dependencies, and packaging ecosystems should invest in first-class support for cooldowns directly in their package managers.”
Tools
Most Popular From Last Issue
The Way I Run Standup Meetings — Marc Gauthier
Notable Links
Advent Of Code: Small programming puzzles, 2025 edition.
Flowglad: OS zero webhooks payment provider.
HL: Transforms logs into a human-readable output.
JS Algorithms: Popular algorithms and data structures.
Strix: OS AI Hackers to secure your apps.
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