Issue #754

Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders

Friday 25th September issue is presented by CodeRabbit

Stop reviewing PRs in the order they arrived. Review in the order that matters.

CodeRabbit Triage is a reviewer-first prioritization layer for the PR queue: a self-updating, cross-repository inbox that tells you which pull request to review next, how deeply to review it and which ones may be safe to close.

Start reviewing the right PRs or tackle low-hanging fruits without leaving the queue.

Find it under Review in CodeRabbit web interface.

— James Shore

tl;dr: “Is AI making software development faster? Most people I talk to say “yes.” But how much? What value are you getting for your money? Are there other ways of using AI that have a better ROI?”

Management Metrics AI

— Mike Fisher

tl;dr: “Write the hypothesis down before the result arrives. Not the goal, the reasoning. What you expect to happen, why you expect it, what would tell you that you were wrong, and what you knew at the time. It is the only way I know to stop your future self from rewriting your past self’s thinking to match whatever happened.“

Management GoalSetting DecisionMaking

tl;dr: Stop reviewing PRs in the order they arrived. Review in the order that matters. CodeRabbit Triage is a reviewer-first prioritization layer for the PR queue: a self-updating, cross-repository inbox that tells you which pull request to review next, how deeply to review it and which ones may be safe to close. Start reviewing the right PRs or tackle low-hanging fruits without leaving the queue. Find it under Review in CodeRabbit web interface.

Promoted by CodeRabbit

CodeReview AI Security

— Brian Houck

tl;dr: CAFE(S) names five properties of good context. The first four ask whether the context lets agents do good work - clarity, actionability, fidelity and efficiency. The fifth - security - asks whether the context is safe to use at all.

Strategy AI Agents

“Intelligence is an accident of evolution, and not necessarily an advantage.”

― Isaac Asimov

tl;dr: To have a positive career you need to be appropriately recognized and rewarded for your work. The author shares techniques to take credit for your work while “driving defensively.”

Influence CareerGrowth

— Brandon Weaver

tl;dr: “As I start to step into another new adventure I took a long hard look at my development setup on my work laptop as well as my home laptop and realized I haven’t really cleaned it up in what, a decade now? It was time for some spring cleaning to get it under control and start asking hard questions about what added value and what had somehow smuggled its way across migrations over the past decade. This post explores some of my setup, why I made certain decisions, and how I’m different now than I was back then.”

Tools+Setup

— Jonah Ezekiel, Lexie Tonelli

tl;dr: “This article covers the work enterprises must do before the modernization takes place: defining what done means, what evidence a change must carry, how certified changes will reach production, and what has to be staged so the run can start.“

Architecture TechDebt AI

— Allen Hutchinson

tl;dr: “The fix I’ve settled on is structural. When a piece of functionality is clean enough to stand on its own, I pull it out into its own repository before it tangles into everything else. It gets its own tests, its own merge queue, its own release cadence. An agent working inside it can hold the whole thing in its head.”

CodeReview AI Testing

tl;dr: “After two years in stealth, countless technical challenges, and research breakthroughs… I am beyond excited to announce that today, TypeSafe AI is releasing our first System One Model: a new class of frontier models built to make fast, structured decisions that software can use directly.”

LanguageDesign

Recompiling

Hand-drawn by Manu, inspired by XKCD’s Compiling” View the Null Pointer series.

AI Engineering From Scratch: OS curriculum that builds AI algos by hand.

Laya: System 1 decision engine.

OpenCodeReview: AI-powered code review CLI tool.

Hindsight: Agent memory that learns.

Univer: Office harness for agents.

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