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- Issue #694
Issue #694
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 27th February issue is presented by Packmind
Most teams adopt AI coding without an engineering playbook. Standards live in heads, Slack, PR comments, or scattered docs — so AI agents guess.
Packmind helps teams build a shared engineering playbook and automatically enforce it across repos and coding agents. Try Packmind Open Source and scale AI coding safely.
— Ed Batista
tl;dr: In any dialogue, negotiation, or decision-making process, we often engage the other parties in one of two modes: advocacy or inquiry. When we’re in advocacy mode, our goal is to achieve a desired outcome, our state of mind is determination, and our approach is to overcome resistance to our point of view. When we’re in inquiry mode our goal is to surface new information, our state of mind is curiosity, and our approach is to ask questions that will elicit candor.
Leadership Management
— Kevin Goldsmith
tl;dr: “What makes this transition particularly tricky is that the behaviors that got you here often stop working once you arrive. When you manage a team, being close to the work is an asset. When you manage managers, that same instinct quietly becomes a liability.”
Leadership Management
tl;dr: AI coding agents don’t fail because the model is weak, they fail because context drifts. Most teams bootstrap CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md once… and never maintain them. Outdated instructions quietly degrade output quality over time. Here’s how to audit and evaluate your agent context before drift becomes rework.
Promoted by Packmind
Agents AI
— Mike Fisher
tl;dr: “Leaders didn’t set out to make people’s work harder or less productive. But small missteps, offhand comments, or ambiguous signals wound up reshaping where people invested their energy, often at great cost.”
Leadership Management
“Control your own destiny or someone else will.”
— Bjorn Roche
tl;dr: “I’ve heard from lawyers that juries decide cases based on their emotions and only use the detailed courtroom evidence to rationalize their verdict. The same thing applies when you are looking to get promoted: first you need to win emotionally, and then supply the proof. In this case, the emotion you must win on is trust.”
CareerAdvice
— 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
— Rahul Garg
tl;dr: “AI coding assistants default to generic patterns from their training data. I propose treating project context as infrastructure - versioned files that prime the model before each session—rather than relying on ad-hoc copy-pasting. This is essentially manual RAG, and I believe it fundamentally changes the quality of AI-generated code.”
AI
— Boris Tane
tl;dr: “I’ve been using Claude Code as my primary development tool for approx 9 months, and the workflow I’ve settled into is radically different from what most people do with AI coding tools. Most developers type a prompt, sometimes use plan mode, fix the errors, repeat.“
BestPractices AI
— Frederick Vanbrabant
tl;dr: “All of these things are nearly impossible to map. It’s too complicated a problem. The same is true for organizations and enterprise architecture. Yet it’s an enterprise architect’s job to map out an organization.”
Architecture
Null Pointer
Who You Gonna Call
Hand-drawn by Manu. Got an idea for a cartoon? Click reply and let us know
Most Popular From Last Issue
Building An Elite AI Engineering Culture In 2026 - Chris Roth
Notable Links
Agents: Build and deploy AI Agents on Cloudflare.
Frontend Slides: Animation-rich presentations using Claude.
Limits: Control layer for AI agents.
Macky: Connect to Mac terminal from iPhone.
PgDog: Proxy for scaling PostgreSQL.
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