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- Issue #755
Issue #755
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 29th September issue is presented by Unblocked
Your agents know the code. Give them the rest of your organizational context.
Unblocked reasons across your code, conversations, issues, docs, and production systems so agents can complete work correctly with less human intervention.
— Anuja Karnik
tl;dr: “Peer-to-peer feedback is a powerful growth tool, and yet candid feedback is rare. We treat all feedback as positive - either to strengthen confidence or improve effectiveness. Based on this principle we can form several patterns for both giving and receiving feedback to help teams improve their interactions.”
Management TeamHealth Feedback
— Louise Deason
tl;dr: (1) Your job has changed. (2) Stop doing the work. (3) Learn for a month. (4) Accept that you are now the weather. (5) Let them run the 1:1. (6) Embrace the shit. (7) Work out what your new manager wants. (8) Give the hard feedback early. (9) Keep receipts for your people. (10) Know what seat you've taken.
Management NewManager Tips
— 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 Oct 7 to see how leading teams solve this with a context layer (includes a live demo).
Promoted by Unblocked
Event AI Agents
— Sunil Sadasivan
tl;dr: “This seems complex, but it’s actually quite simple, and I believe it’s the key to being a successful strategic thinker in systems and organizations. This model works in every system I can think of — applications and products, computing systems of limited resources, and people, teams and large-scale organizations.”
Leadership OrgDesign Strategy
“Your calendar should represent a plan to achieve your goals.”
— Sean Goedecke
tl;dr: “When someone is explaining something to me, I ask on average one question every thirty seconds. I’m sure this is frustrating to some people, but it’s actually a good habit and you should do it too.”
CareerGrowth Communication
tl;dr: Every auth test reaches an environment you do not control. Someone points staging at production credentials, someone else shares a test user, and nobody can force a 503 to test the unhappy paths. @workos/emulate is an open-source WorkOS API server you run yourself. Seed the users, orgs, RBAC, and SSO connections you need, then force any endpoint to fail. Payloads are generated from the WorkOS API spec, so tests match production.
Promoted by WorkOS
OpenSource Testing Auth
— Vinoo Ganesh
tl;dr: “I’ve built pieces of the forward deployed function three times, at three different institutions, over the course of over a decade. Here’s what I’ve seen work, what I’ve seen fail, and where I think this goes.”
Leadership IndustryTrends AI
— Fatih Arslan
tl;dr: “There are probably hundreds of posts like this. But I wanted to share my workflow about how I create and manage a fleet of agents. I've had huge success with it over the past few months.”
Productivity AI Agents
— Jynn Nelson
tl;dr: “The price of using machine learning intelligence is decreasing by several orders of magnitude a year and shows no signs of slowing. We are likely to see LLMs integrated into every part of computing as infrastructure, not just as a product, in the next year or two.”
Infrastructure IndustryTrends AI
Editorial
What 308 Engineering Leaders Can't Say At Work
Leadership coaches Alia Connor and Fiona Siseman of Frank and Eddy Leadership asked 308 engineering leaders at LDX3 New York: What's the biggest issue you're facing that you don't have a space to talk about at work?
A few themes came up:
AI gains aren't reaching individuals. When a task takes one day instead of five, the time saved goes into more work, not back to the person doing it. Teams are shipping more, but nobody's workload is getting lighter.
Speed has a cost, and someone else is paying it. Faster code generation shows up downstream as low-quality PRs, longer reviews, and bugs.
Leaders aren't sure what their job is anymore. Some worry they won't have one. Others say AI is making the work feel less meaningful. A few are asking whether they should go back to being hands-on.
No one is connecting expectations to reality. At every level, people blamed the layer above them for being unrealistic about AI, but they're afraid to raise concerns. Even middle managers are toeing the line, not voicing what’s happening.
We would love to hear from you. Click reply and let us know the biggest issue you are facing at work.
Thanks to Alia Connor and Fiona Siseman of Frank and Eddy Leadership for sharing the results.
Most Popular From Last Issue
My Development Setup In 2026 - Brandon Weaver
Notable Links
Cate: A spatial desktop IDE.
Design.md: A format specification for describing a visual identity to coding agents.
iFixAi: Independent auditing of agents.
Jev Ultrafast: Fastest and cheapest web agent.
OpenRig: Harness that runs Claude and Codex as one.
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