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Like always, I am sharing my best findings for the week. 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
Something Big Is Happening
12 minutes read.
It's fun to see how the industry (and the world) changes, and how perspectives here vary and real-life experience changes. Personalized software will increase (software you build for yourself or for your family and friends), there is no doubt in that. Standards and scale don't appear at this stage. Fixes are trivial. Generated tests mean absolutely nothing (they're terrible), yet you don't care much. No doubt the technology will continue to mature, and with that, our ability to build scalable software. Stop seeing yourself as a "coder," "designer," or "product manager," and go back to the roots: "I'm a builder." Put your curiosity to find leverage, not to judge your (yesterday’s) role in it.
Read it later via Instapaper.
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Legacy CI is too slow for the speed of AI
Code is written in seconds, but Docker builds still take 20 mins. Depot's Co-Founder & CEO Kyle Galbraith on why infra is the new bottleneck for AI-driven teams and what engineering leaders must do to adopt. See why your build is the new bottleneck.
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Culture
“Don’t Worry, There Will Still Be Great Jobs Even When AI Automates Everything.” the Jobs:
1 minute read.
My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile.
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AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It
3 minutes read.
We'll see the type of behaviors Simon Willison covers here happening more and more. People are going back to time and energy management. With new tools, your focus should be on what to work on and why. It will be to squeeze 3-4 hours of great deep work, versus cramming 9 to 12 hours thinking you're productive. Work yields more work. Deep work, with high leverage (why and what, not how), will yield 20 hours of agentic execution that help you promote your vision at a speed beyond imagination, to where technology was just 12 months ago.
Read it later via Instapaper.
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Context Graphs, One Month In
8 minutes read.
Capturing your research and planning phases as artifacts alongside the output (e.g., code or design) will be critical. Companies that conduct Design Reviews and Architecture Decision Records already see some of the value in capturing it. It will need to go deeper to truly capture complex dependencies, data schemas, and many small modifications and nuances for data-intensive or mission-critical products. Extensive tribal knowledge will be an organizational smell you'll need to deal with, like Tech Debt.
Read it later via Instapaper.
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2026: The Biggest Year of M&A in History?
8 minutes read.
"Contrast that with private AI companies: they can spend freely to capture market share, while public companies must find efficiencies first, battle internal resistance, navigate regulatory constraints, and deliver returns every quarter. This helps explain why, despite enormous potential, enterprise AI adoption remains “at the very beginning,” as Ben notes." -- Interesting context on the market in 2026, given the changes AI creates for different types of companies.
Read it later via Instapaper.
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Peopleware
Good CISO / Bad CISO
5 minutes read.
I like the format of Good X / Bad X to provide clarity on the role and what to look for when hiring. If you're in the process of hiring a CISO or considering whether or not you need one, this is the post for you.
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Making Codebases Agent Ready (Video)
15 minutes read.
This is a pragmatic video to watch if you're considering how to start shifting your codebase, development environment, and production environment (aka SDLC) to support agentic development. The better you become at verification, the faster you can iterate on changes. Figure out how to set up different verification mechanisms and how to control your rollouts to production so you can continue delivering deterministic value to your users while moving faster.
Read it later via Instapaper.
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You Have 12 Shots in Life
7 minutes read.
This is a powerful framing to use when considering where to put your energy and talent to work: "Each shot should expand your capabilities, compound your relationships, create lasting artifacts and position you for better future shots. Your shots should get bigger as you get better. They're all part of the same game - creating beautiful, impactful work that makes you feel like you've truly lived."
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
And finally, inspiring tweets...
@SahilBloom: I'm increasingly convinced that burnout doesn't come from working long hours or weekends. Burnout comes from working on things that drain your energy with people that do the same.
@dexhorthy: a minute spent in design/architecture is worth 10-100 minutes of code review time
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.
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