Issue #699
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 17th March’s issue is presented by QA Wolf
Cut Your QA Cycles Down From Hours To Minutes With Automated Testing
If slow QA processes bottleneck your engineering team and slow down releases, you need QA Wolf.
Their AI-native service gets engineering teams to 80% automated E2E test coverage, helping them ship 5x faster by reducing QA cycles from hours to minutes.
Trusted by Drata, Cohere, AutoTrader, and many more.
Slow Down To Speed Up
— James Stanier
tl;dr: “We’ll explore when deliberate slowness pays off, including using AI itself for the slow work, and how fast prototyping is actually a form of slowing down. And finally, we’ll grapple with a question that’s getting harder to answer: why are you taking so long?”
Leadership Management
Management In The Age Of AI
tl;dr: Covers six key management principles: (1) Managers must be builders. (2) Managers must expect more. (3) Managers must manage budgets. (4) Goal clarity is non-negotiable. (5) Collaboration needs a forcing function. (6) Hire like it matters more than ever.
Leadership Management
Cut Your QA Cycles Down From Hours To Minutes With Automated Testing
tl;dr: QA Wolf’s AI-native service achieves 80% automated E2E test coverage, enabling 5x faster shipping. Features include unlimited parallel test runs, 24-hour maintenance, human-verified bug reports, and zero flakes guarantee.
Promoted by QA Wolf
Tests Tools
How To Handle Overly Confident And Combative Colleagues
— Yue Zhao
tl;dr: “Working with this type of coworker is draining, mentally and emotionally. However, they are able to behave this way because they are in the good graces of senior leadership. This makes collaboration with them an unfortunate necessity.”
CareerAdvice
“Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.” — Robert Louis Stevenson
How The New York Times Is Scaling Unit Test Coverage Using AI Tools
— Eric Chima, Leonardo Quixada
tl;dr: “Our goal was to improve the reliability of our web app, but also to evaluate AI products and determine how far we could push them to do work in bulk across our codebase.”
Tests
When Everyone Becomes a Coder, Agents Need Better Context
— Simba Khadder, Yusuf Bahadur, Philip Laussermair
tl;dr: AI coding assistants democratize software development, but agents often generate outdated patterns, miss newer capabilities, and don’t surface knowledge gaps. Redis Agent Skills aim to address this.
Promoted by Redis
Agents
Yegge’s Developer-Agent Evolution Model
— Justin Abrahms
tl;dr: “In Welcome to Gas Town, Steve Yegge generated a list of the 8 stages of agentic workflow evolution. I find myself wanting to deep link to it, so I’m replicating it here.”
CareerAdvice Agents
The Tech Behind Your 2025 Wrapped Highlights
— Yoshnee Raveendran
tl;dr: “For each eligible user, we identified up to five remarkable days from their 2025 listening history. We generated a personalized, LLM-generated ‘report’ for each, essentially a creative narrative grounded entirely in real listening data.”
Architecture
Managing Multiple Agents
— Jeff Foster
tl;dr: “Agent-driven AI programming is so 2025. This year, it’s all about co-ordinating multiple agents who work together as a team, with shared tasks, inter-agent messaging and centralized management.”