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- Issue #697
Issue #697
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 10th March issue is presented by Unblocked
Give Cursor, Claude, and Copilot the organizational knowledge they need to generate code that reflects how your system actually works.
Unblocked synthesizes your code, PR history, conversations, docs, and runtime signals to surface the right context for each task.
— Michael Lopp
tl;dr: “In this piece, I will explain the projects, people, and political developments you always want to share — no matter what. While I will strive to make this complete, there is one type of development you must always report.”
Leadership Management CareerAdvice
tl;dr: “As you would expect, better managers have fewer emergencies, and worse managers have more. And at the extremes, it’s common to find that the best managers basically never have preventable emergencies, and the worst managers have teams which are constantly in a state of emergency, to the point that they’re 100% reactive.”
Leadership Management
— Dennis Pilarinos
tl;dr: AI coding tools are fast, capable, and completely context-blind. Even with rules, skills, and MCP connections, they generate code that misses your conventions, ignores past decisions, and breaks patterns. You end up paying for that gap in rework and tokens. What do we need to do to actually give AI tools the understanding they need?
Promoted by Unblocked
Agents Tools
— Nick Zylkowski
tl;dr: “I’ve spent the past several months building AI advisors for both work and personal contexts. I use them daily to speed up research, bounce ideas, challenge my decisions, and identify patterns I should work on to step up as a leader.”
Leadership Management
“One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency.”
— Saranya Vedagiri
tl;dr: “The heart of this article is simple: low latency isn’t an optimization - it’s a design outcome. It emerges from the choices we make about data locality, async vs. sync flows, cache boundaries, error isolation, and observability. Achieving sub-100 ms is possible for many systems, but sustaining it under load takes alignment across engineering, product, and operations.”
Architecture API
tl;dr: There is a new "velocity tax" in software development. As AI adoption grows, your teams aren't necessarily working less — they are spending 25% of their week fixing and securing AI-generated code. This hidden cost creates a verification bottleneck that stalls innovation. Sonar provides the automated, trusted analysis needed to bridge the gap between AI speed and production-grade quality.
Promoted by Sonar
Tools Productivity
— Yoav Aviram
tl;dr: “Dedicated to all those who are sceptical about the significance of agentic coding, and to those who are not, and are wondering what it means for the future of their profession.“
Tools Productivity
— Manuel Schipper
tl;dr: “I’ve been running parallel coding agents with a lightweight setup for a few months now with tmux, Markdown files, bash aliases, and six slash commands. These are vanilla agents - no subagent profiles or orchestrators, but I do use a role naming convention per tmux window.”
Agents
— Kevin Ho, Carol Liang
tl;dr: “We wanted to answer this question: can agents autonomously build complete Stripe integrations? When it comes to businesses running on Stripe, a mostly correct integration is a failure; payments require 100% accuracy. What matters is not just an agent’s ability to generate code, but its capacity to verify, test, and validate that code with the rigor of a human engineer.”
Tests
Most Popular From Last Issue
Reflections On The Future Of Software Engineering Retreat - Rachel Laycock
Notable Links
Agency: A complete agency of AI specialists.
Electrobun: Build fast, tiny, cross-platform desktop apps.
Hermes Agent: Agent that grows with you.
Open Terminal: A computer you can curl.
Page Agent: In-page GUI agent.
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