Issue #706
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 10th April’s issue is presented by SerpApi
Add Real-Time Web Search To Your AI Apps
AI is smarter when it can search the web. How are AI companies doing it? Meet the worst-kept secret in the AI industry: the SerpApi web search API. Scrape Google and other search engines, integrate with a dead-simple GET request that any agent can make. Used by NVIDIA, Uber, Adobe, and even the United Nations.
Finding Comfort In The Uncertainty
— Annie Vella
tl;dr: “A retreat of engineering leaders and researchers highlights growing uncertainty around AI’s impact on software development. Key themes include shifting bottlenecks, rising cognitive load, evolving roles, and the need for new abstractions, governance, and systems to manage agents.”
Leadership Management
The Alarm That Went Silent
— Mike Fisher
tl;dr: “Teams optimize for metrics that are visible while quietly accumulating risk in areas that are harder to quantify: team burnout, customer frustration that hasn’t yet surfaced as churn, growing operational fragility, cultural erosion, or decision latency caused by process overhead. Just as critically, teams rarely ask a harder question: How would we know if our metrics stopped telling the truth?”
Leadership Management
Add Real-Time Web Search To Your AI Apps
tl;dr: “AI is smarter when it can search the web. How are AI companies doing it? Meet the worst-kept secret in the AI industry: the SerpApi web search API: (1) Scrape Google and other search engines (including AI overviews, Maps, Shopping, Amazon, and more). (2) Integrate with a dead-simple GET request that any agent can make. (3) Used by NVIDIA, Uber, Adobe, and even the United Nations.”
Promoted by SerpApi
Search AI Tools
Say The Thing You Want
— Matheus Lima
tl;dr: “When people know what you want, they can help you get it (so obvious, and yet...). This is especially true for your manager. A big part of their job is putting people in positions where they can grow. But they can’t send opportunities your way if they don’t know which direction you’re heading. They have seven other reports and their own fires to deal with.”
CareerAdvice
“There are three essentials to leadership: humility, clarity and courage.” — Fuchan Yuan
Feedback Flywheel
— Rahul Garg
tl;dr: “Every AI interaction generates signal: prompts that worked, context that was missing, patterns that succeeded, failures worth preventing. Most teams discard this signal. I propose a structured feedback practice that harvests learnings from AI sessions and feeds them back into the team’s shared artifacts, turning individual experience into collective improvement.”
AI BestPractices
Registration Now Open: IaCConf 2026
tl;dr: “IaCConf brings together the engineers and platform leads who’ve already figured it out — and are willing to show their work. Catch live demos, practitioner talks, and candid discussion you won’t find anywhere else. No theory or vendor pitches.”
Promoted by Spacelift
Infrastructure
DHH’s New Way Of Writing Code
— David Heinemeier Hansson, Gergely Orosz
tl;dr: “David discusses his approach to building software, how it’s changed in the last six months, and why he now takes an agent-first approach, and how he barely writes any code by hand. We go into how he uses AI agents: which alter how he builds and explores ideas, but also how his standards of quality and craft remain the same.”
Productivity Agents
Components Of A Coding Agent
— Sebastian Raschka
tl;dr: “In this article, I want to cover the overall design of coding agents and agent harnesses: what they are, how they work, and how the different pieces fit together in practice.”
Agents
The Git Commands I Run Before Reading Any Code
— Alex Piechowski
tl;dr: “The first thing I usually do when I pick up a new codebase isn’t opening the code. It’s opening a terminal and running a handful of git commands. Before I look at a single file, the commit history gives me a diagnostic picture of the project: who built it, where the problems cluster, whether the team is shipping with confidence or tiptoeing around land mines.”