Issue #707
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Tuesday 14th April’s issue is presented by Unblocked
Unblocked: Context That Saves You Time And Tokens
Unblocked gives Cursor, Codex, Claude, and Copilot the organizational knowledge to generate mergeable code without the back and forth. It pulls context from across your engineering stack, resolves conflicts, and cuts the rework cycle by delivering only what agents need for the task at hand.
Who Will Be The Senior Engineers Of 2035?
— James Stanier
tl;dr: “We’ll start by looking at the pipeline we used to have: how senior engineers traditionally emerged through years of mistakes, mentorship, and low-stakes learning. Then we’ll examine what’s replacing it, and hypothesise whether AI will actually fill the gap. We’ll explore three possible scenarios for 2035, and finish with what this means depending on where you sit in the industry.”
Leadership Management
The Complicators, The Drama Aggregators, And The Avoiders
— Michael Lopp
tl;dr: “While you figure that out, let me alert you to three drives that are going to consume a disproportionate amount of your time, frustrate your engineers, and erode your leadership credibility.”
Leadership Management
[Webinar] How To Stop Babysitting Your Agents
tl;dr: “Agents can generate code. Getting it right for your system is the hard part — you end up wasting time and tokens in the back and forth. More MCPs solve access but not understanding. Join us for a FREE webinar on April 23 to see how to give agents exactly what they need to generate mergeable code the first time.”
Promoted by Unblocked
Agents Event
The Economics Of Software Teams: Why Most Organizations Are Flying Blind
— Viktor Cessan
tl;dr: “This post works through the financial logic of software teams, from what a team of eight engineers actually costs per month to what it needs to generate to be economically viable. It also examines why most teams have no visibility into either number, how that condition was built over two decades, and what the arrival of LLMs now means for organizations that have been treating large engineering headcount as an asset.”
Leadership Management
“Don’t find fault, find a remedy.” — Henry Ford
Developer Ramp-Up Time Continues To Accelerate With AI
— Justin Reock
tl;dr: “Onboarding new hires has always been an expensive and time-consuming process, and an area where AI has the opportunity to have a meaningful impact. In Q4 2025, when we looked at Time to 10th PR (a measure we use to track ramp-up time), we saw AI already having a dramatic effect. In some companies, Time to 10th PR was cut in half: from 91 days with no AI usage to 49 days with daily AI use.”
Leadership Management AI
Get A Faster Database And Save Money
tl;dr: “Experience why companies like Cursor, Intercom, and Cash App choose PlanetScale to power their databases. Blazing fast NVMe, low-latency, 99.999% uptime. Available for Postgres and MySQL with sharded Postgres coming soon. There’s no catch — we’ll even help you migrate!”
Promoted by PlanetScale
Database
S3 Files And The Changing Face Of S3
— Andrew Warfield
tl;dr: “Andy writes about the solution that his team came up with: S3 Files. The hard-won lessons, a few genuinely funny moments, and at least one ill-fated attempt to name a new data type. It is a fascinating read that I think you’ll enjoy.”
Architecture
Chess In Pure SQL
tl;dr: “What if I told you SQL could play chess? Not ‘store chess moves in a database.’ Not ‘track game state in a table.’ Actually render a chess board. With pieces. That you can move around. In your browser. Using nothing but SELECT, UPDATE, and a bit of creative thinking.”
SQL
Git’s Magic Files
— Andrew Nesbitt
tl;dr: “Git looks for several special files in your repository that control its behavior. These aren’t configuration files in .git/, they’re committed files that travel with your code and affect how git treats your files. If you’re building a tool that works with git repositories, like git-pkgs, you’ll want to ensure you respect these configs.”