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- Issue #751
Issue #751
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 15th September issue is presented by Unblocked
Your agents know the code. Give them the rest of the context.
Unblocked reasons across your code, conversations, issues, docs, and production systems so agents can complete work correctly with less human intervention.
— Jade Rubick
tl;dr: The job of an executive follows a very simple algorithm: (1) Figure out what needs to happen. (2) Figure out how to make it happen. (3) Make it happen. This is simple, but it’s not easy. In fact, it’s so simple it seems dumb to lay it out. But it’s surprisingly... well, not something people take to automatically.
Leadership Management
— Charity Majors
tl;dr: “So maybe we all just need to be ruthlessly outcome-oriented. Build the best thing we can, as fast as we can. AI is a powerful and versatile tool, so we should use it wherever we can to make our work better and do it faster. Is it really that simple? I had nearly convinced myself that it was, when I noticed how contradictory my own behavior had become.” Charity shares a framework for thinking about when AI involvement is additive or a violation.
Management CareerGrowth AI
— Brandon Waselnuk
tl;dr: Agents can generate code. Getting it right for your system is the hard part – you end up wasting time and tokens in the back and forth. More MCPs solve access but not understanding. Join us for a FREE webinar on Sep 23 to see how leading teams solve this with a context layer (includes a live demo).
Promoted by Unblocked
Event AI Agents
— 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
“Start with the end in mind.”
— Laurie Voss
tl;dr: “This post is an attempt to build on those and make a forecast of where the industry is going in the next 10 years. Making a 10 year forecast of anything is of course a crazy thing to try to do, and especially about the business of software right now. To make it, I had to make two very big assumptions.”
AI Product IndustryTrends
tl;dr: Your devs are using AI coding agents. Bad news: That’s a security risk. Good news: It doesn’t have to be. With Coder Agents, the credentials don’t leave the control plane. It runs in your own environment with every action tied to an SSO identity. Approve models you trust, cap spending at the team level, and view the full audit trail.
Promoted by Coder
Agents Infrastructure Security
— Gergely Orosz
tl;dr: “One question haunting the minds of CTOs and heads of engineering whom I’ve been talking with, is how to deal with large quantities of code review which have only been growing now that AI agents generate most code at many tech companies.”
Management AI CodeReview
— Dan Luu
tl;dr: “Here, we test if simple instructions to agents to use particular techniques or libraries improve implementation correctness, as a kind of test to see how effective agents are when guided by someone with no expertise in testing who's maybe heard that you should apply certain techniques or use certain libraries.”
AI Testing Agents
— Alexander Belanger
tl;dr: “Over the past half year or so, I’ve been writing an internal doc for our engineers trying to distill two years of Postgres battles into a somewhat cohesive document. While I love the Postgres manual, I find it’s hard to turn to when shit hits the fan because it’s just so darn comprehensive. I thought this might be useful for others and would appreciate feedback (or other tidbits that you’ve learned running Postgres in production).”
Guide Database PostgreSQL
Most Popular From Last Issue
How To Grow Past Senior Engineer - Gregor Ojstersek
Notable Links
Claude-Red: Security skills for Claude.
Flowsint: OS OSINT graph exploration tool.
Localsend: OS cross-platform alternative to AirDrop.
WebLLM: In-browser LLM inference engine.
Worktrunk: CLI for Git worktree management.
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