In a world where it's hard to keep up with so much content, I hope my curation helps you find high-signal content worth reading slowly and deeply.   

Under "Culture," you'll find content worth reading and sharing with others; you'll need others' help to pull it off. Under "Peopleware," you'll find content that can help you approach situations differently with new perspectives and frameworks.

 

This Week's Favorite

Agent Responsibly
5 minutes read.

"The gap between ״this PR looks correct״ and ״this PR is safe to ship״ has always existed. Agents widen that gap by producing code that looks more flawless than ever, while remaining entirely blind to production realities. [...] The endgame isn't a world where engineers apply extraordinary rigor to every change. It's a world where the infrastructure itself is rigorous. Where shipping fast is safe by default because the system contains the blast radius, validates continuously, degrades gracefully, and encodes best practices as executable defaults." -- A must-read post that we should all follow with our teams when adopting AI to build critical production software with us.

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Culture

Your Company’s CI/CD Pipeline
1 minute read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile. Sometimes, it just works.

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From Hierarchy to Intelligence
7 minutes read.

In the past 20 years, I've been reading, thinking, and practicing enough (working in the industry) to know that org-design is incredibly hard to shift beyond hundreds of people. Block's attempt with "The world model handles alignment. The DRI structure handles strategy and priority. The player-coach handles craft and people." is important because technology might help us find a new balance, one that is more effective and scalable. I didn't find anything in this post that changes the fundamentals, beyond general statements and a lot of good intentions. Still, they may be experimenting with it now and plan to share how they approach building an effective world model that people trust to influence prioritization and overall strategy (e.g., who's guiding the DRIs?).

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Racing to the Bottom: Faux ‘Low Cost’ Strategies
7 minutes read.

Roger Martin helps us think about pricing in a way that is strategic and meaningful, both to us (our margins) and to our customers (their preferences): "Strategy is and will always be an integrated set of choices that compels desired customer action. And to produce distinctively meritorious results, those choices must be distinctive. And to be distinctive, the opposite of the choices can’t be stupid on their face. [...] You should aim to serve some customers exceedingly well while competitors serve others equally well — whether you are a differentiator or cost leader. It is that sort of real strategy choice that averts races to the bottom. That kind of choice is better for everyone — the company, its competitors, customers, employees, and society in general."

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Why Your Engineering Team Is Slow (It's the Codebase, Not the People)
7 minutes read.

The Codebase Drag Audit is a simple, useful framework for understanding how well your codebase is ready for generative coding. Use it to influence focus areas.

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Peopleware

Relocating Rigor
7 minutes read.

"Generative AI appears to remove the ultimate constraint: hand-written code. That makes people nervous, and it should. But the danger isn't probabilistic generation. The danger is quiet failure. Here's what I mean. When you generate code instead of writing it, you lose the incidental knowledge that comes from typing every character. You lose the friction that forces you to understand. You can produce systems that work without ever knowing why they work. [...] But the answer isn't to reject generation. The answer is to relocate the discipline. Generative systems only work if invariants are explicit rather than implicit. Interfaces must be real contracts, not incidental boundaries. Evaluation must be ruthless. Failures must be loud and immediate. The engineer's job shifts from typing code to specifying intent and verifying outcomes. [...] The pattern is: probabilistic inside, deterministic at the edges." -- So well written. This post should be shared with your engineering and product teams to enable a broad discussion that will change your Platform Roadmap and also let all engineering teams practice delivering value in a different way. "Where the rigor move?" is a great framing to think in today's AI era.

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Finding Comfort in the Uncertainty
7 minutes read.

So many great gems (and a clear understanding that everyone is still iterating and learning) in this post by Annie Vella. Above all, the incentives clearly changed, so doing the right thing is also easier and more urgent than ever: "The argument isn’t for more controls. It’s for better defaults - so that speed and safety aren’t in tension. One group observed that the things that make agents effective (clear standards, good documentation, well-structured code) are the same things that made developers effective. We spent years advocating for Developer Experience and often struggled to get investment. Now organisations are keen to invest in the same things - but for agents. Is ‘Agent Experience’ the new DevEx? And if so, might humans quietly benefit too? [...] AI amplifies existing conditions. Organisations that already had strong teams, good platforms, and clear governance got faster. Organisations without those foundations got messier. Several groups converged on the idea that the first year of AI adoption should focus on preparing the system - platform foundations, governance, AI fluency uplift - rather than expecting broad productivity gains immediately."

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@jasonfried: Being busy is simply being busy. It's not proof of anything.

@dexhorthy: lord give me the confidence of a CEO describing a 2.5x improvement as an “order of magnitude”
 


p.s. if you're interested in joining SWLW's Slack channel, simply reply to this email and let me know. If you're leading a team, consider writing your Manager README (it's free) or getting my e-book and interviews Leading Snowflakes: The New Engineering Manager's Handbook. You can also support me by becoming a SWLW Patron. Thank you ❤️



Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.