- Pointer
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- Issue #731
Issue #731
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 7th July’s issue is presented by Unlocked
Unblocked turns code, docs, tickets, and conversations into actionable context, so engineers move faster and agents stay on track.
— Kirill Bobrov
tl;dr: “I’ve developed a mental checklist of “stupid” questions that have saved me more times than I can count.” The author shares some of these with the understanding that most engineering failures happen because someone was afraid to look stupid.
Communication CareerGrowth
— Dunya Kirkali
tl;dr: “Sometimes you need to fly high: looking at strategy, direction, and the broader system around the team. Sometimes you need to fly low: joining the details, removing friction, and helping the team through turbulence. The hard part is knowing when to change altitude.”
Leadership Management TeamHealth
tl;dr: AI is in your engineering workflow. While the token spend shows it, the throughput doesn't. The human is very much still in the loop, and that's a context problem. This free webinar maps the 8 levels of context maturity: where most teams are stuck, what the ceiling looks like at each stage, and what it actually takes to make the most out of your agents. Join live July 23 (FREE).
Promoted by Unblocked
Agents AI Event
— Cong Wang
tl;dr: “Over the years I’ve slowly stopped arguing. Not because I stopped caring about being right, but because I finally understood what an argument actually is, and what it can and cannot do. Here is what changed my mind.”
Communication Influence
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”
— Jesse Vincent
tl;dr: “I want to tell you a bit about how we've started shipping some changes to internal production with an "agentic user in the loop." Letting an agent work directly with the implementer building its runloop and tooling is getting us higher-quality tools and experiences for the agent without a human in the middle of a game of telephone.”
DevEx Agents AI
— Vijay Shekhawat
tl;dr: TRM Labs built an AI agent that upgraded their StarRocks database across 58 releases with zero downtime. A shadow proxy mirrored production traffic while an autonomous agent diagnosed bottlenecks, optimized queries, and validated fixes - all without human intervention. The result: dozens of endpoints optimized, a critical bug caught, and up to 94% latency improvement.
Promoted by TRM Labs
CaseStudy Database Agents
— Geoffrey Litt
tl;dr: “Hot take: I think it's still important to understand the code that our agents write! In this talk I'll explain why that's the case, and show some ideas for how to efficiently understand code. Alright, let's dive in.”
CodeQuality AI
— Franco Fernando
tl;dr: “In this issue, we will see when keeping duplication is a reasonable tradeoff, and when it is worth the effort to remove it.”
CodeQuality TechDebt
— Fabien Sanglard
tl;dr: “When I started using computers, we had a Sinclair ZX Spectrum at home and a nano-reseau of Thomson MO5s at elementary school. I distinctly remember how unpleasant it was to type with them. These must have been the worst keyboards I ever used. Ever since, I have paid close attention to the keyboards I use. Here is the list of my all-time favorites.”
Tools+Setup
Most Popular From Last Issue
So You Want to Fix Your All Hands - Michael Lopp
Notable Links
Claude-Video: Give Claude the ability to watch any video.
Copybara: Transforming and moving code between repositories.
Design.md: A format specification for describing a visual identity to coding agents.
GitFut: GitHub stats turned into a World-Cup player card.
Ipblocklist: IP lists full of bad IPs.
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