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- Issue #698
Issue #698
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 13th March issue is presented by PropelAuth
Design the perfect auth and onboarding experience for your users with PropelAuth's new Integration MCP Server. Pick and choose which features you need, and seamlessly match your product's look and feel.
Don't worry about auth: your agent can handle it while you work on your YC application.
— Michael Lopp
tl;dr: “One of my least favorite moments as a leader, specifically your leader, is when you ask me to make the decision.” Michael shares three tactics he used to get you to decide.
Leadership Management
— Steve Huynh
tl;dr: “I’m going to teach you three techniques that changed how I communicate at work. You can use them individually, but for the best results, you want to use all three together. And I’m going to use each technique to explain itself, so you can see them working in real time.”
CareerAdvice
tl;dr: Design the perfect auth and onboarding experience for your users with PropelAuth's new Integration MCP Server. Pick and choose which features you need, and seamlessly match your product's look and feel. Don't worry about auth: your agent can handle it while you work on your YC application.
Promoted by PropelAuth
Tools
— John Allsopp
tl;dr: “What we’re witnessing isn’t a tooling debate. It’s a paradigm shift, complete with anomaly denial, incommensurable worldviews, and paradigm defence mechanisms that have played out very similarly in every intellectual revolution Kuhn observed. Understanding this pattern won’t make the transition painless, but it might make it possible.”
Trends
“Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.”
— Frederick Vanbrabant
tl;dr: “I’ve done a lot of research about this over the years, and I would like to share my ideas on how to set up a documentation store. This is going to be a two part post. The first one is the general outline and philosophy. The second part is about structuring project governance documentation.”
Documentation
tl;dr: Autonomous actors inside production systems pose risks that don’t trade off with speed. Securing them requires identity, not static secrets. Teleport’s Agentic Identity Framework establishes an architecture for deploying agents with cryptographic identity, access controls, and observability across infrastructure.
Promoted by Teleport
Agents
— Jerred Shepherd
tl;dr: “Effectively using AI required fundamental shift in how I thought about my projects. Why did I care about types? Why do we have design patterns? Why does code need to be maintainable or “well written”. For hobby projects, it can be a source of pleasure to write and see beautiful code.”
Tools CareerAdvice
— Jonathan Frere
tl;dr: “It’s looking like I’m going to need to build a reactive engine for work, so I’m going to prepare for that by writing down what I know about them. I want to look at three ways of building reactive engines: push reactivity, pull reactivity, and the hybrid push/pull combination that is used in a bunch of web frameworks.”
Algo
— Bassim Eledath
tl;dr: “That gap doesn't close overnight. It closes in levels. 8 of them. Most of you reading this are likely past the first few, and you should be eager to reach the next one because each subsequent level is a huge leap in output, and every improvement in model capability amplifies those gains further.”
Agents
Null Pointer
AI Only Bar
Hand-drawn by Manu. Got an idea for a cartoon? Click reply and let us know
Most Popular From Last Issue
Managing Up - Michael Lopp
Notable Links
Claude Skills: 66 skills & 9 workflows.
Cmux: Ghostty-based macOS terminal.
Hindsight: Agent memory that learns.
Impeccable: Design fluency for AI harnesses.
Superpowers: Development workflow for coding agents.
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