- Pointer
- Posts
- Issue #743
Issue #743
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 18th August’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.
tl;dr: “As companies get larger, scheduling a decision starts to take longer than making it. Decisions that used to get alignment in an hour now can only happen three weeks from now, once Michael and Melissa are both back.”
Management DecisionMaking
— Mike Fisher
tl;dr: “Here is your assignment for this week. The next time you are asked to improve something, a plan, a document, a product, an org design, your own calendar, force yourself to generate at least one subtractive option before you allow yourself a single additive one.”
Leadership DecisionMaking
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. Join live on Aug 19 (FREE) to learn how to track AI productivity, how context maturity affects where teams stall, and what it takes to get real value from your agents.
Promoted by Unblocked
Event Metrics AI
— Michael Lopp
tl;dr: “The competent leaders are aware of these behaviors, their consequences, and the carefully constructed compensation techniques that lessen their impact on themselves and the humans.” Michael also shares his leadership tics.
Leadership Management CareerGrowth
“The leader who denies their shadow will one day wear its chains.”
— Brandon Weaver
tl;dr: “This series explores what changes when engineers move past the senior level into staff and principal roles... I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about over the past 15 years, having now seen it at several companies, including how I’ve likely contributed to this problem myself. So what do we do then, when hope feels lost? That’s what I want to explore with this article, as I increasingly believe the most important responsibility we have as engineering leaders is creating hope.”
Staff+ CareerGrowth
— Luka Biber
tl;dr: "I want engineers who use AI to write code faster. I do not want candidates quietly reading AI answers to questions about a language they have supposedly mastered over ten or twenty years. The initial screening call is where you find out which one you have.”
Promoted by Remgu
Management AI Hiring
— Lydia Hallie
tl;dr: “Being efficient with tokens doesn't mean using fewer of them overall. It means making sure the ones you do use go towards the thing you actually asked for. So let's look at what decides the price of a token, then what decides how many of them a session sends, and along the way, what that means for how you run a session.”
Productivity AI CostOptimization
— Ben Joffe
tl;dr: “Throughout this article I will present a range of really fast functions to solve this problem, tuned for different use cases (throughput vs latency, different platforms etc.). Each outperforms existing solutions, and many have a latency of just a single multiplication plus two cycles.“
DeepDive Performance Algo
— Annie Sexton
tl;dr: “I was reading about compression recently when I stumbled upon something crazy: that compressors and LLMs are, at their core, trying to solve the exact same problem. In this post, I’m going to walk us through the basics of compression to understand its deep relationship with language modeling. It’s probably going to blow your mind.”
AI DeepDive
Most Popular From Last Issue
Advice So Common You Think You Can Skip It - Steve Huynh
Notable Links
Defuddle: Get the content of any page as markdown.
Interview Coach: Covers the full job search lifecycle.
Modly: OS AI-powered image-to-3D generation.
Omarchy: Modern & opinionated Linux distribution.
Portless: Replace port numbers with named local URLs.
How did you like this issue of Pointer?1 = Didn't enjoy it all // 5 = Really enjoyed it |