Issue #703
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 31st March’s issue is presented by WorkOS
WorkOS FGA: The Authorization Layer For AI Agents
Every AI agent demo looks magical, but most hit a wall in enterprise deployment. It’s not model quality or latency. It’s authorization. Authentication proves an agent’s identity. Authorization defines its blast radius.
The winners in enterprise AI won’t have the most features. They’ll be the ones enterprises can safely trust. Learn how WorkOS FGA scopes that blast radius with resource-level permissions.
How Do You Know If You’re A Good Leader?
— Mike Fisher
tl;dr: “Feeling unsure may not be a sign that you’re failing as a leader. It may be a sign that you’re taking the role seriously enough to do the hardest work first, the work inside your own head. That kind of introspection raises a harder question for the rest of us: How do you actually know if you’re a good leader?”
Leadership Management
Nobody Is Coming To Save Your Career
— Steve Huynh
tl;dr: “Most people assume someone will tap them on the shoulder when it’s time. In my experience, that assumption is the single biggest reason high performers get stuck. Here are three truths about who owns your career, and what to do if you realize that you’re trapped on the wrong side of them.”
CareerAdvice
WorkOS Pipes: The Connectivity Layer For AI Agents
— Zack Proser, Dan Doorman, Michael Hadley
tl;dr: Your product can’t see what’s in Slack, GitHub, or Salesforce. Most tools are locked to their own database, blind to everything users actually live in — and that’s the ceiling on what you can build. WorkOS Pipes removes it. One API call connects your product to the apps your users already use, so you can pull context across silos, power agents that act across services, and never think about credential management again.
Promoted by WorkOS
Agents
What About Juniors?
— Marc Brooker
tl;dr: “In any time of change, the people who can learn and adapt fastest are most likely to succeed. The senior’s advantage is that they have a lot of knowledge and context. The junior’s advantage is that they come in knowing that they need to learn, adapt, and change.”
CareerAdvice
“Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.” — Publilius Syrus
Software Engineering Splits In Three
— Matteo Collina
tl;dr: AI-assisted development shifts software engineering’s bottleneck from coding to judgment, changing how organizations build software. The article outlines three emerging tiers — from tech giants to small businesses — and explains evolving roles, talent needs, and why platforms, guardrails, and senior expertise become critical.
Leadership Management
Analyze Privileged Sessions At Scale
tl;dr: Reviewing sessions manually doesn’t scale. Teleport analyzes activity across infrastructure, generating summaries, flagging anomalies, and adding context so teams can investigate faster. From audits to incident response, get clear visibility into what actually happened. Investigate sessions faster.
Promoted by Teleport
Observability Incidents
Scaling A Monolith To 1M LOC: 113 Pragmatic Lessons From Tech Lead To CTO
— Jack Kinsella
tl;dr: A practical guide to scaling a large codebase, covering performance, system design, monitoring, and team practices. It outlines common issues like database bottlenecks and deployment risks, along with strategies for debugging, testing, and maintaining reliability as systems and teams grow.
Architecture BestPractices
Harness Design For Long-Running Application Development
— Prithvi Rajasekaran
tl;dr: “Harness design is key to performance at the frontier of agentic coding. Here’s how we pushed Claude further in frontend design and long-running autonomous software engineering.”
Design
How To Do AI-Assisted Engineering
— Gregor Ojstersek
tl;dr: Engineers and engineering leaders share how they are doing AI-assisted engineering. They come from a variety of backgrounds and a range of company sizes, from startups to mid-sized and large organizations.