Issue #702
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 27th March’s issue is presented by PropelAuth
One Prompt. Complete Auth.
Design the perfect auth and onboarding experience for your users with PropelAuth’s new Integration MCP Server. Pick and choose which features you need, and seamlessly match your product’s look and feel.
Don’t worry about auth: your agent can handle it while you work on your YC application.
How Can Engineering Leaders Assess Their AI Maturity?
— Lizzie Matusov
tl;dr: “Every engineering organization is adopting AI in some form — but the gap between teams experimenting with copilots and teams running autonomous workflows is large. Most leaders know they’re ‘using AI,’ but few have a clear picture of how deeply it’s actually integrated, or what capabilities they’d need to build to get more value from it. This week we ask: How can engineering leaders assess their AI maturity, and what does it take to move to the next level?”
Leadership Management
Creating Momentum When An Employee Is Stuck
— Lara Hogan
tl;dr: “So what do you do when you’re working with a teammate who is stuck in a cycle of unhelpful or unproductive behavior? You’ve got empathy for them; you don’t want to be a jerk about it. But you still need this person to change course and start moving forward.”
Leadership Management
One Prompt. Complete Auth.
tl;dr: “Design the perfect auth and onboarding experience for your users with PropelAuth’s new Integration MCP Server. Pick and choose which features you need, and seamlessly match your product’s look and feel. Don’t worry about auth: your agent can handle it while you work on your YC application.”
Promoted by PropelAuth
Tools
Things I Believe
— Lee Robinson
tl;dr: “(1) Shipping fast beats the best strategy. (2) You have no career ceiling. (3) Be ruthlessly truth seeking. (4) Communication is the job. (5) Education is the best form of developer marketing. (6) Leadership means owning outcomes beyond the org chart. (7) Work can also be your hobby. (8) Demos > memos. (9) Hiring is what separates good leaders from great. (10) Always try to assume good intent.”
CareerAdvice
“Stars do not pull each other down to be more visible; they shine brighter.” — Matshona Dhliwayo
My Heuristics Are Wrong. What Now?
— Marc Brooker
tl;dr: “We’ve seen this play out in small ways before. Over the last decade, I’ve frequently been frustrated by experienced folks who didn’t update their system design heuristics to match the cloud, to match SSDs, to match 100Gb/s networks, and so on. But this is the biggest change I’ve seen in my career by far. An extinction-level event for rules of thumb.”
CareerAdvice
What Comes After Your IDE?
tl;dr: “Stop herding your AI agents across terminals and branches. Intent bundles each task into a single workspace with a living spec, agent notes, and full change visibility. Orchestrate agents like a system, not a swarm: direct specialists, keep work aligned, and ship without copy-pasting context. Free with your existing Augment / Claude Code / Codex / OpenCode subscription.”
Promoted by AugmentCode
Tools
Small Programming Tricks
— Will Keleher
tl;dr: “But I think there are some nuggets of knowledge that are particularly valuable and don’t require a lot of supporting mental infrastructure. You don’t need to know any python to use python3 -m http.server to start a simple server in a directory, but it might still make your work marginally easier.”
Tips
How to Kill The Code Review
— Ankit Jain
tl;dr: “The answer is to move the human checkpoint upstream. If the thought of not reviewing code seems scary, let me remind you that checkpoints have moved before in software development. We moved from waterfall sign-offs to continuous integration. We can move them again.”
CodeReview
Shell Tricks That Actually Make Life Easier (And Save Your Sanity)
— Christian Hofstede-Kuhn
tl;dr: “Here are some tricks that aren’t exactly secret, but aren’t always taught either. To keep the peace in our extended Unix family, I’ve split these into two camps: the universal tricks that work on almost any POSIX-ish shell, and the quality-of-life additions specific to interactive shells like Bash or Zsh.”