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SPONSOR - Gauntlet AI Night School: Why System Design Is So Critical With AI And How To Learn It -Wednesday 5/27 6ET

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Join Byron Mackay as he breaks down why system design is becoming one of the most important skills for software engineers in an AI-first job market.
In this session, you’ll learn how to:

From Metrics To Meaning

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

— Mike Fisher

tl;dr: “The retention curve that goes down is actually a more powerful narrative tool than the one that goes up, because it creates urgency, names an enemy, and invites the team into the fight. Honest reckoning builds more trust than optimistic reporting.” Mike shares The Story Frame - a framework for how leaders should present metrics to their team.

AI Productivity Debate

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

— Justin Reock

tl;dr: A panel of senior engineering and research leaders who debated the following: (1) Will AI mean fewer engineers? (2) Is AI accelerating technical debt? (3) Will most code be AI-generated within five years? (4) Is the future of engineering about managing agents? (5) Do leaders need to mandate AI adoption? (6) Is code review now the bottleneck? Is risk the only thing holding back adoption? (7) Are AI adoption problems really culture problems?

Gauntlet AI Night School: Why System Design Is So Critical With AI And How To Learn It - Wednesday 5/27 6ET

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

tl;dr: Join Byron Mackay as he breaks down why system design is becoming one of the most important skills for software engineers in an AI-first job market. In this session, you’ll learn how to: (1) Understand why system design is becoming a critical skill for software engineers in an AI-first market. (2) Think more deeply about the technical decisions that impact security, performance, and long-term maintainability. (3) Recognize key system design topics to study, including databases, data flow, authorization, and schema design.
Promoted by Gauntlet

Barely Treading Water

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

— Michael Lopp

tl;dr: Michael describes the moment his chief of staff told him he was the problem - barely treading water as a senior leader. The fix: admit you're failing, ruthlessly prioritize with a trusted other, delegate even when you think people aren't ready, and say no to everything else.

Software's Centaur Era

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

— Richard Marmorstein

tl;dr: Richard argues we're not in software's "centaur era" yet - the point where human-AI teams outperform either alone. AI coding agents still can't reliably make independent progress on long projects, which is why software engineers are valuable. Even when they can, human jobs don't disappear until AI teams working alone beat human-AI teams, which took decades in chess.

The Production Version Of Wiring Claude Code Into Your Pipeline

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

— Santosh Kumar Radha

tl;dr: If your team has chained Claude Code to write, then to review, you already know the pattern. Harness orchestration is the architectural discipline behind it, a first look at how Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini compose as primitives. Read the breakdown — written for engineering leaders evaluating the agent layer.
Promoted by AgentField.ai

Maintainability Sensors For Coding Agents

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

— Birgitta Böckeler

tl;dr: “Internal quality problems affect AI agents in similar ways that they affect human developers. An agent working in a tangled codebase might look in the wrong place for an existing implementation, create inconsistencies because it has not noticed a duplicate, or be forced to load more context than a task should require. In this article, I describe my experimentation with various sensors that help us and AI reflect on the maintainability of a codebase, and what I learned from that.”

Learnings From 100K Lines Of Rust With AI

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

— Cheng Huang

tl;dr: “This post shares my most valuable learnings on: ensuring correctness with code contracts, applying lightweight spec-driven development, and pursuing aggressive performance optimization - plus my wish list for the future of AI-assisted coding.”

Always Be Blaming

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

— Alex Kladov

tl;dr: Alex walks through his advanced git blame workflows in service of understanding code history and the "why" behind code changes. He describes this as a 4D approach to reading code.

SPONSOR - Reduce Your Vector Database Bill By 90%+

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Agents are only as good as the context they can retrieve. If they miss a doc, they miss the answer.
turbopuffer is a fast search engine that makes every byte searchable at a fraction of the cost of traditional vector databases. Cursor, Cognition, and Notion run retrieval on turbopuffer.

I’m An Introvert. This Is How I Get Myself To Speak Up.

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

— Wes Kao

tl;dr: “Prepare go-to phrases to insert yourself in meetings, ask a colleague to keep you accountable, and other tactics I personally use to get myself to speak up.”

Distilling Leadership Wisdom

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

— James Stanier

tl;dr: “This month, we’re going to explore a practical technique for learning from leaders you’ll never have access to: distilling their thinking into an AI role you can query on demand.”

Reduce Your Vector Database Bill By 90%+

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

tl;dr: Agents are only as good as the context they can retrieve. If they miss a doc, they miss the answer. turbopuffer is a fast search engine that makes every byte searchable at a fraction of the cost of traditional vector databases. Cursor, Cognition, and Notion run retrieval on turbopuffer. (1) p90 latency: 8ms. (2) 1M docs for under $5/month. (3) Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Search Every Byte For 10x Less.
Promoted by turbopuffer

How I Use LLMs As A Staff Engineer In 2026

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

— Sean Goedecke

tl;dr: “A year ago I would very occasionally ask an agent to make changes to a single file if it was a simple change I couldn’t be bothered typing out. Sometimes I would copy a function I wrote into a LLM chat window for feedback. But now I start every single change by asking an agent to solve the problem, and usually push the PR after a single editing pass.”

Learning Software Architecture

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

— Alex Kladov

tl;dr: Alex argues that the real skill isn't technical design but understanding how social incentives shape code. He illustrates this with rust-analyzer. Your codebase will mirror your organization's incentive structure whether you design for it or not.

AI Is Writing Code Faster Than Ever, But Who Checks It?

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

tl;dr: When speed is prioritized over reliability, technical debt and security risks accumulate silently. To realize the full ROI of AI, organizations must shift from manual reviews to an automated verification layer. Evaluate your next vendor with: (1) Six evaluation pillars for modern code review. (2) Strategies to solve the AI productivity paradox. (3) A comprehensive checklist for code health.
Promoted by Sonar

Interrogatory LLM

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

— Martin Fowler

tl;dr: "When we need an LLM to perform a complex task, we often need to feed it a lot of context. Coming up with a design for a new feature requires descriptions of how we want the feature to appear to the user, guidelines on how it should be implemented, information on external systems to consult, and so on. All this can be several pages of markdown. The obvious way to do this is for a human to write this context, but an alternative is to use an LLM to write this context after interviewing a human."

I Don't Think AI Will Make Your Processes Go Faster

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

— Frederick Vanbrabant

tl;dr: “I have the feeling that every organization out there is, at least partially, focusing on process optimization, something that often happens when the market is down. These days there is also the AI angle to the entire thing, and the unrealistic expectations that follow it.” Frederick shares why throwing AI at a current process doesn’t have impact until you solve the upstream issues.

Using An Engineering Notebook

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

— Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya

tl;dr: “One of my core software engineering practices is writing, by hand, in a physical notebook. It's one of the most important things I do to remain productive and effective. Maybe the single most important. And it's a practice that I see very few others using!”