- Pointer
- Posts
- Issue #692
Issue #692
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 20th February issue is presented by WorkOS
npx workos launches an AI agent, powered by Claude, that reads your project, detects your framework, and writes a complete auth integration directly into your existing codebase. It's not a template generator. It reads your code, understands your stack, and writes an integration that fits.
Then it typechecks and builds, feeding any errors back to itself to fix. Just run npx workos, from WorkOS.
— Nabeel Qureshi
tl;dr: “A cursed fact of the world is that the most important life lessons you learn are the hardest to communicate to others. They always sound like clichés. In any case, these are a few things I’ve learned from experience and that I try and keep in mind.”
CareerAdvice
— Mike Fisher
tl;dr: “That’s a pattern I’ve seen repeatedly since then, both as a leader and as someone who has benefited from leaders. The highest-impact mentorship moments aren’t about advice. They’re about recognition. About someone else articulating a coherent story of your potential before you can fully tell it yourself.”
Leadership Management
— Pavan Kulkarni, Aaron Tainter
tl;dr: Authentication proves an agent's identity. Authorization defines its blast radius. Most agents today inherit a user's full access token, turning a helpful assistant into a confused deputy that can leak production secrets to a shared Slack channel. This post digs into why that happens and how WorkOS FGA solves this by scoping the blast radius with resource-level permissions.
Promoted by WorkOS
Agents AI
— Lorin Hochstein
tl;dr: “One of the virtues of OKRs is that they are straightforward for managers to apply. You set direction by specifying objectives, and you enforce accountability by monitoring key results. Applying Deming’s approach, on the other hand, requires a much greater commitment of management bandwidth. Drucker offers a control mechanism with a bounded amount of information, where Deming requires a never-ending research program, with no upper bound on the kind of information that might be relevant.“
Leadership Management
“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”
— Brittany Ellich
tl;dr: “Glue work, which was previously viewed as critical but not rewarded, is becoming the most critical skill. The ability to delegate effectively to AI agents, to review their output with good judgment, to connect the dots between teams and systems and people… that’s the whole job now. The folks who spent their careers doing the unglamorous work of making teams successful are suddenly the most valuable people in the room.”
ThoughtPiece
— Hilman Ramadhan
tl;dr: Build AI apps without scraping headaches. Learn how a Web Search API extends model knowledge, delivers real-time data, and gives you full control and flexibility.
Promoted by SerpAPI
Search API AI
— Allan Pike
tl;dr: “At that point, I reached for an age-old tool that has gotten more useful in the modern age: binary search. That is, you explain the symptom to your coding agent. Then you have it repeatedly remove stuff from your code that might be causing the problem, and see if that fixes it. When you find something that fixes it, you iteratively re-add everything until you have a minimal change that indicates the underlying issue, and thus a workaround.”
Debugging
— Uzeyir Abdullayev
tl;dr: “That was the moment we started asking a different question. Instead of asking how to fix E2E failures faster, we asked if we could help engineers understand failures sooner, while the change context was still accessible.”
Tests AI
— Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya
tl;dr: “It turns out, Docker doesn't automatically rotate log files! As long as a container exists, the logs will keep growing for it. This means even if you stop a container and start it again, the logs are still there and getting bigger. I'd not thought about this before, but it turns out that when my blog is seeing heavy traffic, the logs can grow in order of megabytes per hour. And that really adds up over time.”
Docker
Null Pointer
Crankin' it out
Hand-drawn by Manu. Got an idea for a cartoon? Click reply and let us know
Most Popular From Last Issue
Three Bad Managers - Michael Lopp
Notable Links
Convert: Truly universal online file converter.
Gogcli: Google in your terminal.
Microgpt: Most atomic way to train and run inference for a GPT.
Oat: Ultra-lightweight UI library.
Superpowers: Development workflow for coding agents.
How did you like this issue of Pointer?1 = Didn't enjoy it all // 5 = Really enjoyed it |