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- Issue #756
Issue #756
The Briefing For Engineering Leaders
Friday 2nd October issue is presented by Larridin
AI changed how software ships. Most engineering metrics didn't keep up. Larridin built the AI-native standard for engineering performance, measuring velocity, code quality, and production reliability.
Engineering Output weighted by complexity and quality
AI Output Share and AI Slop Index
Code Durability and change failure rate
— Wes Kao
tl;dr: “Prepare go-to phrases to insert yourself in meetings, ask a colleague to keep you accountable, and other tactics I personally use to get myself to speak up.”
Career Communication
— John Cutler
tl;dr: “Every trap below begins with a strength or virtue. Curiosity. Empathy. Courage. Helpfulness. Sensitivity. Intellectual honesty. A willingness to question. A desire to make things better. The ability to see patterns other people miss.”
Career
tl;dr: AI changed how software ships. Most engineering metrics didn't keep up. Larridin built the AI-native standard for engineering performance, measuring velocity, code quality, and production reliability. (1) Engineering Output weighted by complexity and quality. (2) AI Output Share and AI Slop Index. (3) Code Durability and change failure rate.
Promoted by Larradin
DevEx AI Metrics
— Sujith Jay Nair
tl;dr: “A big part of a staff engineer’s job in a platform team is to figure out what the team should build next - I like to call that “inventing work”. Thankfully, the signals that help us to invent work are already out there, and they arrive from four directions - from the systems, from the users, from your organization, and from the industry. What follows is a guide to reading each of them.”
Strategy PlatformEngineering Staff+
“Lead from the back - and let others believe they are in front.”
— Lizzie Matusov
tl;dr: “Researchers at the University of Auckland surveyed professional software engineers who were very actively using using AI coding assistants during two time windows (October 2024 and April 2025). Each survey asked about time spent on six development tasks, perceived productivity, and the three DevEx dimensions, alongside open-ended questions about how the tools had changed their work.”
Leadership AI DevEx
tl;dr: Archestra brings an LLM gateway, MCP infrastructure, agent runtime, chat, and knowledge bases into one open-source platform. Authentication, security, observability, and cost controls are built in and shared across the stack. Self-host it and let teams keep using Claude Code, Cursor, and their own agents. Built-in OpenAPPA adds deterministic guardrails that can sanitize data or isolate parts of a task so agents can keep working safely.
Promoted by Archestra
Infrastructure Agents AI
tl;dr: “And there are a few important breakpoints to consider on the journey of growing your team. These might seem a bit obvious, but the important realization is that at these breakpoints hiring decisions are much more important, so if you keep them in mind as hard thresholds you’ll make better scaling decisions.”
Management Scale Hiring
— Sam Attard, Raymond Wang
tl;dr: “This August, we made the core user experience of Claude and the Claude desktop app about 3x faster in a two-week sprint. Users had been telling us it was slow, and they were right. We ran everything from a single Slack channel, with Claude in every thread.”
AI CaseStudy Performance
— Colin James
tl;dr: “This post describes the construction of an Aho-Corasick automaton for the simultaneous matching of substrings within a sequence. I’m fond of this algorithm because it constructs an automaton from an existing tree data structure in a rather pleasant way.”
DeepDive Algo
Null Pointer
Manners
Hand-drawn by Manu. View the Null Pointer series.
Most Popular From Last Issue
Ten Things Nobody Tells You When You Become A Manager - Louise Deason
Notable Links
Impeccable: Design vocabulary for agents.
Moli: Headless browser for agents.
OpenDots: AI that moves between text, calls & Slack.
OpenShell: Private runtime for autonomous agents.
Pi: Agent toolkit.
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