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

Andrej Karpathy: From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering (Video)
30 minutes read.

Andrej Karpathy is always fascinating to listen to! Share it with your team and discuss Andrej's approach for hiring (minute 18:39) - the type of challenges worth using to tease out the qualities we should seek these days.

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Culture

A Very Clever Bookmark Design
1 minute read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile.

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Designing AI-resistant Technical Evaluations
7 minutes read.

"Anthropic's general candidate guidance asks candidates to complete take-homes without AI unless indicated otherwise. For this take-home, we explicitly indicate otherwise. Longer-horizon problems are harder for AI to solve completely, so candidates can use AI tools (as they would on the job) while still needing to demonstrate their own skills. [...] I had a problem. We were about to release a model where the best strategy on our take-home would be delegating to Claude Code." -- It's incredible to read how Anthropic screens candidates and the iterations they made. In many ways, finding performance engineers is like finding cyber researchers.

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The Bruno Method: Engineering in the Compiler Age
13 minutes read.

Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz (Nexar's CTO) shares his thinking and framework on Agentic Engineering and the role of engineers in it. Worth clicking on "Notes" when going over the slides.

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Software Fundamentals Matter More Than Ever (Video)
18 minutes read.

Reading books is still an unfair advantage. Setting a harness around Agents to follow the rules in these books can get you so much, but it won't teach you the fundamentals. You will use it, but won't understand it. Matt Pocock's talk will inspire you to read the books and use the skills he wrote to work more effectively with AI. "Before you code, reach a shared design concept" is a powerful framing I'm going to use.

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Peopleware

Gazing at the Misty AI Frontier
6 minutes read.

Great insights by Elad Gil. Use "AI will eat closed loops first" if you're thinking of new products or companies to build.

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The Critical Shift in What Differentiates Great Leaders
5 minutes read.

"With AI “winning” the wisdom of the brain, the leaders who will matter in the next decade are those who can create, connect, and influence not just with data and logic, but also with emotions and a strong sense of ethics." -- Interesting take by Yue Zhao. I think that AI models are raising the floor but not yet setting the ceiling. Original thinking has very little repetition for the models to promote it. Go deeper, pick the road less traveled, or at least dare to try out things that feel almost crazy to explore.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@SahilBloom: My grandfather told me: The worst decisions in life are made when you allow your head to talk you into something when your gut already said no. I'll never forget that.

@readswithravi: “If it’s endurable, then endure it. Stop complaining.”



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.