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Issue #722
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 5th June’s issue is presented by Gauntlet
Join Derek Peters as he breaks down how engineers and product managers can use AI-first workflows to plan more clearly, prompt more intentionally, and move from idea to execution without losing control of the product.
In this session, you’ll learn how to:
Understand how AI is changing the role of engineers and product managers
Move beyond vibe coding by taking a more intentional approach to planning and prompting
Use AI tools to support product plans, roadmaps, use cases, go-to-market strategy, and milestones
Think like the “CEO” of the product by directing AI tools instead of letting them lead the process
Learn more about Night School including access to past sessions: https://gauntletai.com/night-school
— Molly Graham
tl;dr: “It sounds almost insultingly simple: make things memorable. But I’ve watched smart leaders at good companies invest enormous energy into goals and values that don’t actually have any effect on behavior — not because they got the strategy wrong, but because they made things too complex for it to stick.”
Leadership Management Communication
— Christoph Nakazawa
tl;dr: "I’ve been trying to wrap my head around engineering values and principles that matter for 2026 and beyond that will help individuals and organizations move faster. Looking at my engineering workflow it feels like on one hand everything changed, and on the other, not that much."
Management AI
tl;dr: Join Derek Peters as he breaks down how engineers and product managers can use AI-first workflows to plan more clearly, prompt more intentionally, and move from idea to execution without losing control of the product. In this session, you’ll learn how to: (1) Understand how AI is changing the role of engineers and product managers. (2) Move beyond vibe coding by taking a more intentional approach to planning and prompting. (3) Use AI tools to support product plans, roadmaps, use cases, go-to-market strategy, and milestones. (4) Think like the “CEO” of the product by directing AI tools instead of letting them lead the process.
Promoted by Gauntlet
Event AI
— Charity Majors
tl;dr: “I am writing for relatively high-performing teams that are transforming from pre-AI to AI-native. These are teams with engineering discipline and skill who care deeply, who are struggling precisely because there are so many legitimate, competing threats and no obvious answers.”
Leadership Strategy AI
“The trick is to fix the problem you have, rather than the problem you want.”
— Thorsten Ball
tl;dr: “If someone says “we need this feature”, don’t go “yes, let me build it” and hack on something for 4 weeks only for the other person to ultimately go “that’s not what I meant.” No. Instead, embrace that we need to learn, that we need to try and play around with this idea as fast as possible, in a way that lets us learn. To embrace that idea means that you try to figure out “what is it they mean” as fast as possible, with the minimal effort required, so you can LEARN what it is you’re building.”
DevEx Product
— Andrew Israel
tl;dr: OAuth 2.1 is used in everything from Sign in with Google to integrating with third parties to MCP server authentication. Learn how it works with this article.
Promoted by PropelAuth
Security
— Sean Goedecke
tl;dr: “I definitely would not have done all of these by hand. I might have found the time to do one or two of them, but based on my pre-AI track record they would probably have stayed in the “GitHub repo with a few commits” stage. This list is a kind of existence proof: a bunch of weird projects, useful to at least some people, that would not have existed without AI assistance.”
Entertaining Productivity AI
— Loris Cro
tl;dr: I think “disabling asserts in prod” is a pretty common technique, yeah? As far as I know that is probably a correct statement, but I believe it to be an irredeemably bad practice.
Debugging CodeQuality
— Dr Milan Milanović
tl;dr: “Some of these books are really old, like 15-20 years or more, but they are still valid because they contain evergreen knowledge. But there are some new ones which I believe will become evergreen in the future. You will notice they are mostly tech-agnostic, so they can be relevant in many fields. I grouped the books by the problem they solve. Because the right question isn’t “what should I read?” It’s “What am I struggling with right now?”
CareerGrowth Books
Null Pointer
No Belt, No Pager
Hand-drawn by Manu. View the Null Pointer series
Most Popular From Last Issue
Fast Is Better Than Slow - Patrick Dubroy
Notable Links
Flowsint: Platform for extensible graph-based investigations
Herdr: Agent multiplexer in your terminal.
Knowhere: Prepare unstructured data for agents.
Spec-kit: Toolkit to start spec-driven development.
Swarm: OS pentesting tool.
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