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- Issue #696
Issue #696
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 6th March issue is presented by WorkOS
Every B2B company hits the same inflection point — enterprise customers show up and they need SSO, directory sync, audit logs, and role-based access before they'll move forward. Most teams lose months building that infrastructure. It doesn't have to be that way.
With WorkOS you get all of it. One platform for auth, identity, and security. Infrastructure for teams that ship fast and stay fast.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Perplexity already chose WorkOS over building it themselves.
— Rachel Laycock
tl;dr: (1) The need to address cognitive load. (2) The staff engineer role is changing. (3) Testing and code reviews. (4) Agent topologies. (5) Programming languages. (6) Self-healing systems.
Leadership Management
— Cate Hall
tl;dr: “It’s a funny quirk of the human condition that sometimes simply asking, of a given task, “how would someone much, much better than me approach this?” immediately makes you better at it. Like, right away.”
CareerAdvice
tl;dr: The WorkOS agent reads your project, detects your framework, and writes a complete auth integration into your existing codebase. It then typechecks, builds, and self-corrects any errors. Just run npx workos.
Promoted by WorkOS
Tools
— Molly Graham
tl;dr: Here are six rules: (1) No company needs more than three company goals. (2) One goal needs to win in a fight. (3) Explain it to me like i’m five. (4) Strategy should hurt. (5) One goal. One owner. (6) Goals alone are not enough.
Leadership Management
“I don't want to believe. I want to know.”
— Matheus Lima
tl;dr: “Complexity looks smart. Not because it is, but because our systems are set up to reward it. And the incentive problem doesn’t start at promotion time. It starts before you even get the job.”
CareerAdvice
— Kyle Galbraith
tl;dr: When you can generate a feature in 20 minutes, a 20-minute CI pipeline is unacceptable. Depot’s Co-founder & CEO Kyle Galbraith on why infra is the new bottleneck for AI-driven teams and what engineering leaders must do to adapt.
Promoted by Depot
Architecture AI
— Rahul Garg
tl;dr: “AI coding assistants default to generating implementation immediately — embedding design decisions invisibly in the output. I propose a structured conversation pattern that mirrors whiteboarding with a human pair: progressive levels of design alignment before any code, reducing cognitive load and catching misunderstandings at the cheapest possible moment.”
AI BestPractices
— Siddhant Khare
tl;dr: “This is a fundamentally different kind of work. Creating is energizing. Reviewing is draining. There's research on this - the psychological difference between generative tasks and evaluative tasks. Generative work gives you flow states. Evaluative work gives you decision fatigue.”
AI
— Evan Hahn
tl;dr: “In my mind, errors are divided into two categories. Expected errors (think “user entered invalid data”), which are part of normal operation, aren’t the developer’s fault, and should be handled. Unexpected errors (think “null pointer exception”) are the developer’s fault, likely indicate a bug, and are allowed to crash.”
BestPractices
Null Pointer
Second-hand Thievery
Hand-drawn by Manu. Got an idea for a cartoon? Click reply and let us know
Most Popular From Last Issue
Engineering Productivity In 2026: Where AI Actually Pays Off - Anna Shipman
Notable Links
CLI: One tool for all of Google Workspace.
Emdash: OS agentic development environment.
Ruflo: AI orchestration platform.
Shannon: Autonomous AI pentester for webapps and APIs.
Superset: IDE for the AI agents era.
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