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- Issue #759
Issue #759
The Briefing For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 13th October 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.
— Alex Piechowski
tl;dr: “After years of codebase audits, the same five signals keep showing up, so I finally put them into a scoring rubric: The Codebase Drag Audit. Five signals, scored 0 to 2. If you hit 4 or above, the code needs direct investment before anything else will help.”
Management CodeQuality TechDebt
— Jason Cohen
tl;dr: “Four sincere attempts at OKRs, four failures, and every time: “you didn’t do it right.” Maybe the framework doesn’t fit you — so how do you find one that does?”
Management GoalSetting
— Brandon Waselnuk
tl;dr: You write the rules files, maintain the skills, and paste in the Slack thread your agent missed. But hand-curated context goes stale, and when the sources disagree, your agent can’t tell which is right. Join us live on Oct 28 (FREE) to see how a context engine helps agents get it right the first time.
Promoted by Unblocked
Event AI Agents
— Michael Heap
tl;dr: "At first I thought ""I don't want the details"" sounded dismissive. How can they make informed decisions without understanding the details? Then I realised that ""I don't want the details"" wasn't being dismissive. The executive assumed that we were competent, and was saying ""I already believe you. Now let's talk about what happens next”.
Leadership Communication
“It is not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It is the manager’s job to make it safe to take them.”
— Sean Goedecke
tl;dr: “When you disagree with someone, there are two paths forward. The first is to try to engage with what they’re saying: what their reasons are, whether their position is true, what evidence could be brought to bear, and so on. The second is to diagnose them: to engage with the second-order question of why they’re saying it.”
Leadership Communication
tl;dr: When AI can accelerate execution, traditional signals of seniority don’t tell the whole story. This 30-point checklist gives engineering leaders a practical framework to score senior-level readiness. It includes a ready-to-use interview questionnaire, so you can see if your hiring criteria have kept up.
Promoted by Assuresoft
Guide Hiring AI
— Cindy Sridharan
tl;dr: “I consider this an emergent skillset that’s different from coding or traditional debugging, but like any other skill, it’s one that can be honed with enough effort. While I’m no leading expert in this area, the general contours of how these skills can be actively cultivated are beginning to stand out in sharp relief. By putting my own experiences in writing, I’m hoping to hear from fellow practitioners their thoughts on this topic.”
CodeQuality Debugging
— Ian Vanagas
tl;dr: “We’ve built 10 different AI products at PostHog, including PostHog AI, our install Wizard, Replay Vision, Scouts, and more. They’re used by nearly 100,000 people every month. This is what we’ve learned.”
CaseStudy AI Product
— Alisa Sireneva
tl;dr: “I’ve been thinking about where I stand in respect to the current state of the industry. This is more of a journal note than a post, apologies for that. I usually leave this stuff private, but I thought I’d post this as a trial in case someone relates to this experience and feels less alone.”
Career IndustryTrends
Most Popular From Last Issue
The State Of The Tech Industry In 2026 - Gergely Orosz
Notable Links
Anatomy: Claude skill that explains an idea by building it.
Artcraft: Capable Tools For Artists
Mobile Next: MCP server for mobile dev.
Treg: OpenRouter For Agent Tools
Video-Shotcraft: AI video skill for Claude Code & Codex.
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