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- Issue #766
Issue #766
The Briefing For Engineering Leaders
Friday 6th November issue is presented by WorkOS
An agent with a broad Gmail or CRM token can do anything that token allows, and no role can predict what a task will need.
WorkOS Airlock checks every call against the agent's stated intent and your policies, then allows it, denies it, or sends it to a human.
The agent never holds the provider credential, and every request and verdict is logged.
— Mike Fisher
tl;dr: “Leadership communication works the same way. You can’t send the whole context, so every message compresses it. Some things have to go, and your job is to keep the parts people need to act.”
Leadership Communication
— Gergely Orosz, Ivan Klaric, Jessica Salmon
tl;dr: Neil’s essay won the Pragmatic Engineer’s challenge to showcase how engineering is changing. Neil merged 8-20 PRs per month in his previous job last year. How he’s merging 200+ PRs per month in his current role. He discusses his experience, old constraints that have disappeared, new constraints that have appeared, and how AI is changing software engineering.
DevEx IndustryTrends AI
— Zack Proser
tl;dr: An agent with a broad Gmail or CRM token can do anything that token allows, and no role can predict what a task will need. WorkOS Airlock checks every call against the agent's stated intent and your policies, then allows it, denies it, or sends it to a human. The agent never holds the provider credential, and every request and verdict is logged.
Promoted by WorkOS
Auth Security Agents
— Christoph Nakazawa
tl;dr: "I’ve been trying to wrap my head around engineering values and principles that matter for 2026 and beyond that will help individuals and organizations move faster. Looking at my engineering workflow it feels like on one hand everything changed, and on the other, not that much."
Management AI
“Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.”
— Patrick Dubroy
tl;dr: “About 10 years ago, I realized all the best programmers I had worked with had something in common: they were fast. By that I mean that they moved quickly: we’d discuss a problem and an hour or two later they’d already have a patch ready or a prototype to show off."
Productivity Career
tl;dr: As AI is reshaping how software companies build and deliver products, 91% of independent software companies are already embedding agentic agents into their offerings. Explore how AWS helps ISVs build, scale, and commercialize AI-powered solutions with cloud infrastructure, Amazon Bedrock, and tools designed to accelerate development and bring products to market faster. Explore AWS AI solutions for ISVs.
Promoted by AWS
Infrastructure AI AWS
— Kunal Bhalla
tl;dr: “As we collectively rethink how we work I’ve been finding it useful to read and share other people’s workflows, and consciously write about and examine my own. This particular post focuses on finding the right balance of trust while working with agents.”
Productivity Agents
— Nolan Lawson
tl;dr: But in the agentic era, when developers are no longer typing code by hand and are thus less constrained by DX, I still see vibes ruling the day. Frontends are rewritten because some framework or another is “better for agents.” The resulting code is “faster,” the agents make “fewer mistakes,” etc. Once again, these claims are often made without evidence. Whenever I read one of these accounts, I think to myself, “Where are the benchmarks?”
JavaScript IndustryTrends AI
— Sergey Tselovalnikov
tl;dr: “When looking through a piece of source code recently, I stumbled across this method from Guava - a popular Java library from Google.” Sergey share Guava's whitespace matcher implementation and uncovering an interesting application of a perfect hash function.
DeepDive Algo
Null Pointer
Subsidization
Hand-drawn by Manu. View the Null Pointer series.
Most Popular From Last Issue
Becoming A Better Writer - Gergely Orosz
Notable Links
Doop: Multiplayer design canvas for humans and agents.
LZ4: Lossless compression algorithm.
PR Agent: OS PR reviewer.
Skills: Collection of agent skills to build interfaces.
Worktrunk: CLI for Git worktree management.
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