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- Issue #723
Issue #723
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 9th June’s issue is presented by Unblocked
Unblocked turns code, docs, tickets, and conversations into actionable context, so engineers move faster and agents stay on track.
— Kent Beck
tl;dr: “Trust is as tricky as code. Both are asymmetrical. Code works or it doesn’t. One mistake in a long string of good decisions is the same as just a mistake. Trust accumulates slowly & evaporates in an instant. The difference is that in software sometimes you can repair the mistake in time proportional to the time it took to make the mistake. Trust is irreversible. Once gone it’s hard-to-impossible to get it back.”
Leadership Management TeamHealth
— Cate Hall
tl;dr: “We humans are unfortunately hardwired to readily reject options that will require effort when we think the chances are good that we won’t succeed. Flipping the script from “that won’t work” to “how do I make this work?” can help you discover degrees of agency you didn’t realize you had”
CareerGrowth
tl;dr: AI shows up in 60% of engineering work. Only about a fifth of it can be handed off without someone babysitting the output. That’s because agents are still missing the context you have. Join live June 24 (FREE) to find out how teams pulling ahead are using a context layer to level up.
Promoted by Unblocked
Event AI Agents
— Shreyas Doshi
tl;dr: “Your imagined audience doesn’t know you at all, doesn’t understand you, and doesn’t even care about you. The audience does judge you, but that judging is just for soothing its own insecurities and fears.”
CareerGrowth Wellbeing
"I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions."
— Brian Houck
tl;dr: “The eight myths fall into three groups: how developers actually spend their time, how to measure AI’s impact, and how AI gets adopted in real organizations. The through-line is that the gap between AI’s promise and its measured impact has less to do with the models and more to do with the surrounding system of work.”
DevEx Metrics AI
tl;dr: AI now writes a large share of your team's pull requests - and AI-written code fails differently than code review tooling expects. AgentField open-sourced pr-af, a multi-agent reviewer that designs a review lens per PR instead of running a fixed checklist. Your team sets what blocks a merge vs. what ships. Runs on open or closed models, cents per review. One-click GitHub install - plus their write-up on how code review is evolving when humans aren't writing the diffs.
Promoted by AgentField
OpenSource AI CodeReview
— Tyler Langlois
tl;dr: “A systemd timer is a type of unit that schedules other units on a particular schedule. Timers are effectively a functional replacement for a traditional cron daemon (though you could conceivably run both), and timer calendar settings offer some similarities to help bridge the gap from traditional cron-like expressions.”
DeepDive DevOps Linux
tl;dr: “This article covers the patterns we've observed that have led to successful adoption of Claude Code at scale. We use “large codebase” to refer to a wide range of deployments: monorepos with millions of lines, legacy systems built over decades, dozens of microservices across separate repositories, or any combination of the above.“
Guide DevEx AI
— Mijndert Stuij
tl;dr: “There was never some big optimization project behind this either; I've just always kept my shell minimal and fast and over the years that turned into a habit. Here's how I go about it, and all of it can be found in my dotfiles.”
Guide DevEx Tools+Setup
Editorial Note
Things I find interesting and relevant to the world of software engineering leadership.
“One of the worst rollouts in history”
How a senior engineer described his company’s exec comms around AI to me.
First we’re told to use AI at all costs.
Now we’re told we’re burning too much and need to scale back.
AI is straining the people who keep open source running:
Daniel Stenberg, founder of curl, is struggling to keep up with the increased number of highly detailed daily reports.
The NHS, UK’s public health service, is moving off open source due to the security threat of AI scanning tools.
Ladybird, the independent web browser, is closing public pull requests. A well disguised vulnerability is all an attacker needs.
Building trust in the age of AI is more crucial that ever, as per Kent Beck’s piece in today’s issue.
Sense of Urgency
Chef Thomas Keller’s restaurant French Laundry is world renowned. It’s kitchen is meticulous, with a sign under the clock that reads “Sense of Urgency.”
“It serves as a reminder to push ourselves - for the need to be organized and focused so that we are able to complete our job and the ones following it successfully.”
Most Popular From Last Issue
The Software Engineering Books I Keep Recommending - Dr Milan Milanović
Notable Links
Agent Skills: For Google products and technologies.
Bigset: Build any dataset from the live web.
FFF: File search toolkit for humans and agents.
OpenCR: OS AI code review agent.
Sandboxd: Self-hosted dev sandboxes with preview URLs.
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