Every week I share the top articles I have found and personally read on the internet. I only share the stuff I believe it’s worth your time.

100% signal, 0% slop.

I mainly read things from my public daily digest, which curates an ever growing list of sources. Here is this week’s best stuff 👇

🌀 How to Orchestrate AI Workflows

8 min • Luca Rossi

In the face of my own the ever growing workflows for Refactoring and Tolaria, this week I explored how to scale them from being mostly AI-driven, to a healthy mix of deterministic & AI steps, where actual code is used for plumbing, and AI is used for judgment.

🥇 Software Engineering May No Longer Be a Lifetime Career

6 min • by Sean Goedecke

Using AI to code means you don’t learn as much about coding itself, but refusing to use it puts you at a disadvantage today. So, is software engineering becoming more like professional sports? That is, a career with a finite window rather than a lifetime of compounding skill accumulation.

🥈 GitLab Act 2

19 min • by Bill Staples

GitLab’s CEO lays out their vision and plan for a major restructuring of the company around agentic AI and the future of software delivery. Interesting both as a product vision and as a case study in leading a public company through a platform shift.

🥉 Thin Harness, Fat Skills

3 min • by Garry Tan

By now we know that AI agents become far more productive by using purpose-built skills. It’s still unclear how all of this scales, but Garry’s mental model about growing skills instead of the general harness is solid, and I agree with him.

And that’s it for today! If you find this list useful, please share it with your friends!

Share

You can also read the very same things I read every day via this free daily digest 📬

See you next week!

Sincerely 👋
Luca

Every week I share the top articles I have found and personally read on the internet. I only share the stuff I believe it’s worth your time.

100% signal, 0% slop.

I mainly read things from my public daily digest, which curates an ever growing list of sources. Here is this week’s best stuff 👇

🌀 How I Run the Tolaria Project

15 min • by Luca Rossi

This week I published all the workflows I have put in place to run Tolaria alongside Refactoring. It’s been quite a journey! Tolaria rose among the 10 fastest growing repos across the whole Github, and I had to manage a big inflow of comments, bug reports, and feature requests. In the article I explain how I do it!

🥇 Sometimes Your Job Is to Get in the Way

5 min • by Rands

Good leaders know when to stay out of the way — but great leaders also know when to step in and draw a hard line. Fantastic story by Rands, about how a major Slack outage led to a complete transformation of their development process, driven by strong leadership.

🥈 Why Can’t They Just…

5 min • by Lara Hogan

“Why can’t they just…” is a phrase we all use when frustrated with other teams or roles. Instead of dismissing it, Lara explains how to use it as a signal to dig into the complexities behind decisions you don’t understand, and turn frustration into collaborative problem-solving. Loved it.

🥉 Contributor Poker and AI

6 min • by Loris Cro

Open source maintainers don’t bet on PRs, they bet on contributors. This is a great take by Zig and the best articulated thesis I have heard about banning AI-generated contributions. Worth a read.

And that’s it for today! If you find this list useful, please share it with your friends!

Share

You can also read the very same things I read every day via this free daily digest 📬

See you next week!

Sincerely 👋
Luca

Every week I share the top articles I have found and personally read on the internet. I only share the stuff I believe it’s worth your time.

100% signal, 0% slop.

I mainly read things from my public daily digest, which curates an ever growing list of sources. Here is this week’s best stuff 👇

🌀 The Compounding Software Factory

15 min • by Luca Rossi

For as long as I can remember, the default path of engineering teams is degradation. We just get slower over time. But it doesn’t have to be that way — what if with AI we have a shot at becoming faster over time?

This week I published the third and last article in our software factory series, written with my friend Rob Zuber, CTO of CircleCI. It’s free for everyone!

🥇 The Last Software Engineer

10 min • by Kent C. Dodds

Fast forward to the moment right before AI takes over everything engineers do — what’s the last valuable thing left? I won’t spoiler! Fantastic article by Kent.

🥈 Why Sell Software If Anyone Can Make It?

2 min • by Clemens Adolphs

It’s not hard to make bread at home — even better than the one you buy at the bakery. Yet nobody really does it at scale. Don’t let the “everyone can code now” narrative scare you out of building a software business.

🥉 How I use AI to Code

19 min • by Chris Sherwood

A thorough, opinionated guide on AI coding, updated to April 2026. Covers both the mindset and the practical tools. I liked it!.

And that’s it for today! If you find this list useful, please share it with your friends!

Share

You can also read the very same things I read every day via this free daily digest 📬

See you next week!

Sincerely 👋
Luca

Every week I share the top articles I have found and personally read on the internet. I only share the stuff I believe it’s worth your time.

100% signal, 0% slop.

I mainly read things from my public daily digest, which curates an ever growing list of sources. Here is this week’s best stuff 👇

🌀 Introducing the AI Club

This week I published an announcement that we are starting a monthly AI Club for members of the Refactoring community, to share personal wins, failures, and learnings about AI!

🥇 Who Will Be the Senior Engineers of 2035?

11 min • by James Stanier

Great article by James, who put together a lot of resources and ideas (also from different industries), and connected the dots to understand what may happen to the software engineering job market. Recommended read.

🥈 Open Source Isn’t Dead

3 min • by Alex Schapiro

Cal.com recently announced it’s going closed source, citing AI vulnerability scanning as the #1 reason. This piece pushes back, and I actually agree with it: closing source code doesn’t remove the attack surface — AI can still attack you black-box, at runtime. The better response is continuous AI defense (fire with fire!).

🥉 Agents as Scaffolding for Recurring Tasks

4 min • by Will Larson

Great practical pattern for introducing agents into your workflows: start by prototyping with agent-driven automation, then refactor some agentic parts away into deterministic code, keeping the agent only where it truly shines: navigating ambiguity.

4) Product Management on the AI Exponential

8 min • by Cat Wu

Articles from the Claude Code team about how they work tend to be a bit extreme and should be taken with a grain of salt, but I enjoyed the reflections here about how the PM role is changing. Less roadmaps, more short sprints, more prototypes, and keep things simple.

And that’s it for today! If you find this list useful, please share it with your friends!

Share

You can also read the very same things I read every day via this free daily digest 📬

See you next week!

Sincerely 👋
Luca

Every week I share the top articles I have found and personally read on the internet. I only share the stuff I believe it’s worth your time.

100% signal, 0% slop.

I mainly read things from my public daily digest, which curates an ever growing list of sources. Here is this week’s best stuff 👇

🌀 Updates to my AI Coding Workflow

19 min • by Luca Rossi

This week I published a big article with the latest updates on my AI coding workflow, that includes now ADRs, an overall healthier relationship between OpenClaw and Claude Code, and way less monthly spend! I also talked more about the app I am building, Tolaria.

🥇 The Git Commands I Run Before Reading Any Code

3 min • by Ally Piechowski

Great piece that makes you understand the power of version control history. There is so much you can understand about a codebase (and a team) by running simple git commands. Hotspots, bus factor, bug clusters, crisis patterns — all from git history.

🥈 Feedback Flywheel

10 min • by Rahul Garg

I really liked this article — it’s very practical and proposes some novel angles to AI feedback. Every AI interaction generates signal: prompts that worked, context that was missing, patterns that failed. Rahul proposes a structured practice that takes learnings from AI sessions and feeds them back into the team’s shared artifacts.

🥉 The Human Weight of It

7 min • by Cate Huston

Can Claude replace coaching? Cate has been experimenting: using AI for structured issues, but keeping her human coach for the messier stuff. AI is great when you need structure and validation. But when you need to feel seen, you need the human weight of someone else’s confidence in you. I loved it.

And that’s it for today! If you find this list useful, please share it with your friends!

Share

You can also read the very same things I read every day via this free daily digest 📬

See you next week!

Sincerely 👋
Luca

Every week I share the top articles I have found and personally read on the internet. I only share the stuff I believe it’s worth your time.

100% signal, 0% slop.

I mainly read things from my public daily digest, which curates an ever growing list of sources. Here is this week’s best stuff 👇

🌀 How to Grow your Software Factory

13 min • Luca Rossi

This week I wrote a follow up from our popular The Era of the Software Factory, where I explored how to increase the leverage you get from AI, by creating, rules, modules, and making things compound. Co-authored with Rob Zuber, CTO at CircleCI.

🥇 Every Layer of Review Makes You 10x Slower

11 min • by Avery Pennarun

Awesome piece that many many people I know need to read. Every layer of review makes your process exponentially slower — and AI can speed up the coding part, but it does nothing against the time spent waiting for others to do stuff. Reducing reviews is less about AI and more about building a culture of quality and trust.

🥈 The Middle Loop

7 min • by Annie Vella

AI is shifting engineering work from creation to verification: Annie calls it the middle loop, sitting between the inner loop (writing code) and the outer loop (CI/CD, deploy). A useful mental model for how the day-to-day of engineering is evolving.

🥉 Don’t Let AI Write For You

2 min • by Alex Woods

Writing is fundamentally about structuring your thinking. Producing text is simply a (nice) byproduct of it. So, using LLMs to write for you undermines both your credibility and your ability to reason deeply. Use them for research and brainstorming, but the final words should be yours.

4) AI “Aha” Team Meetings

7 min • by Lara Hogan

There’s a growing gap between engineers who are thriving with AI tools and those who feel left behind. Lara held many interviews to learn more about how teams work today. She proposes regular team meetings where people share their AI aha moments: tips, tricks, and even mistakes.

And that’s it for today! If you find this list useful, please share it with your friends!

Share

You can also read the very same things I read every day via this free daily digest 📬

See you next week!

Sincerely 👋
Luca

Every week I share the top articles I have found and personally read on the internet. I only share the stuff I believe it’s worth your time.

100% signal, 0% slop.

I mainly read things from my public daily digest, which curates an ever growing list of sources. Here is this week’s best stuff 👇

🌀 The Telephone Game of Software

13 min • by Luca Rossi

This week I explored the steps that go from a feature simply being intent in a PM’s mind, to becoming actual code. Each of these steps can act as a lossy translation of the previous ones, and we need to prevent that.

🥇 Architecture Decision Record

8 min • by Martin Fowler

Maintaining ADRs is a great practice, which only got more useful with AI. Martin’s piece is a great primer for them, also linking to useful tools.

🥈 The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis

25 min • by Citrini Research

I finally caught up with this viral imaginary report from 2028, that was published last month. Very useful to read to reflect on the second and third order effects of AI. It was a good test for my own beliefs: which predictions do I find reasonable? Which dubious?

🥉 Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity

8 min • by Matheus Lima

Tale as old as time — we most often reward complexity as a display of brilliance, and ignore simplicity. Engineers who over-build get a compelling narrative, while the ones who ship the simplest (and thus the best!) thing get… nothing.

4) Better, Faster, and Even More

10 min • by Rands

I am really enjoying Rands’ blog lately. It has become a blend of classic Rands’ management advice and occasional tales from his own AI experiments. This is one of the latter. I also love how practical he explains these — there are code snippets!

And that’s it for today! If you find this list useful, please share it with your friends!

Share

You can also read the very same things I read every day via this free daily digest 📬

See you next week!

Sincerely 👋
Luca

Every week I share the top articles I have found and personally read on the internet. I only share the stuff I believe it’s worth your time.

100% signal, 0% slop.

I mainly read things from my public daily digest, which curates an ever growing list of sources. Here is this week’s best stuff 👇

🥇 Finding Comfort in the Uncertainty

8 min • by Annie Vella

Annie joined the future of software development retreat, hosted by Martin Fowler and Thoughtworks, and reported back her thoughts, which I pretty much enjoyed. I love the eight themes she extracted and how she framed them.

🥈 GNU and the AI Reimplementations

9 min • by antirez

Antirez implicitly comments on the recent controversies about AI reimplementations (1, 2) by looking at examples from the past. I loved the historical perspective and also the new mental model he proposes: what matters now is design, novelty, and craft, not just the code itself.

🥉 Prioritize Relatively

2 min • by Boz

Super short post in Boz’s signature style, about how you should not prioritize things in isolation — but only prioritize them against each other.

4) Good Software Knows When to Stop

3 min • by Olivier Girardot

Good software knows the purpose it serves and doesn’t try to do everything. The hardest product discipline is recognizing when what you want to build next doesn’t fit your product vision — and that it should be a different tool instead.

And that’s it for today! If you find this list useful, please share it with your friends!

Share

You can also read the very same things I read every day via this free daily digest 📬

See you next week!

Sincerely 👋
Luca

Every week I share the top articles I have found and personally read on the internet. I only share the stuff I believe it’s worth your time.

100% signal, 0% slop.

I mainly read things from my public daily digest, which curates an ever growing list of sources. Here is this week’s best stuff 👇

🌀 The State of Product Development 2026

16 min • by Luca Rossi

This week we published our biggest research ever, in which we surveyed 340 teams on how they do product development, where the bottlenecks live, and where AI is (and is not) helping. Worth a read if you are interested in what teams actually do, without the hype!

🥇 Agentic Engineering Patterns

15 min • by Simon Willison

This is not a single article, but rather a growing collection of practices and patterns for getting the best results out of coding agents. Simon is an absolute authority on the topic, and I am excited that he has started to gather these systematically.

🥈 Judgment and Creativity Are All You Need

5 min • by Will Larson

Another great piece by Will Larson, where he argues that coding agents have largely solved the constraints of time and attention. The bottleneck has now shifted to judgment: knowing what to build and how to do it in a way that is scalable and maintainable.

🥉 The Claude C Compiler: What It Reveals About the Future of Software

12 min • by Chris Lattner

Chris Lattner, the creator of LLVM, reviews the AI-built C compiler from Anthropic. His verdict is that it’s a genuine milestone, calling it “a competent textbook implementation”. Worth reading to understand what Chris thinks AI can and can’t do today.

4) Block Cut 4,000 Jobs and Blamed AI

25 min • by Conor Bronsdon

Detailed write-up of the Block layoff story, including a lot of context about what possibly led to it, Jack Dorsey’s own track record, and benchmarks from other companies that are (and are not) going through similar paths. It’s a long read, 100% worth it!

And that’s it for today! If you find this list useful, please share it with your friends!

Share

You can also read the very same things I read every day via this free daily digest 📬

See you next week!

Sincerely 👋
Luca

Every week I share the top articles I have found and personally read on the internet. I only share the stuff I believe it’s worth your time.

100% signal, 0% slop.

I mainly read things from my public daily digest, which curates an ever growing list of sources. Here is this week’s best stuff 👇

🌀 The New Pyramid of Software Engineering

12 min • by Luca Rossi

Most AI advice feels either too volatile or too tactical to me. This week I published a piece that zooms out and proposes a three-layer pyramid — Developer Experience, AI, and Product Engineering — where each layer only works if the one below is solid. It also includes a self-assessment survey to rate your team on each layer.

🥇 My (Hypothetical) SRECon26 Keynote

8 min • by Charity Majors

One year after delivering the SRECon25 keynote, Charity reflects on how much her stance about AI has changed, going from grudgingly acknowledging it to fully embracing it. Superb post, extremely well written (as usual).

🥈 The Software Development Lifecycle Is Dead

11 min • by Boris Tane

Provokative post about how AI has compressed the SDLC to the point of being unrecognizable. The new lifecycle is a tight loop: intent → build → observe → repeat. The new big skill is context engineering, and the new safety net is observability.

🥉 The Stranger Secret: How to Talk to Anyone

8 min • by The Guardian

We’ve lost the habit of talking to strangers. Technology and social norms have shrunk everyday exchanges to near zero, and that’s a loss — for us and for society. This is a great reminder that small, unplanned conversations are one of the most enriching things we can do, and that the skill is worth actively maintaining.

4) Red/Green TDD — Agentic Engineering Patterns

2 min • by Simon Willison

“Use red/green TDD” might be the highest-leverage four-word prompt you can give a coding agent. These are Simon’s words, and I confirm! Write tests first, confirm they fail, then let the agent iterate until they pass. It prevents the two biggest agent risks: code that doesn’t work, and code that’s unnecessary. Part of Simon’s excellent new Agentic Engineering Patterns guide.

And that’s it for today! If you find this list useful, please share it with your friends!

Share

You can also read the very same things I read every day via this free daily digest 📬

See you next week!

Sincerely 👋
Luca

Every week I share the top articles I have found and personally read on the internet. I only share the stuff I believe it’s worth your time.

100% signal, 0% slop.

I mainly read things from my public daily digest, which curates an ever growing list of sources. Here is this week’s best stuff 👇

🌀 The Era of The Software Factory

14 min • by Luca Rossi & Rob Zuber

This week I have published some reflections following the latest State of Software Delivery report, and how it feels that the whole dev process is shifting into a new era. This is a thought piece grounded in a lot of data, which is hard to ignore at this point.

🥇 Outcome Engineering — The o16g Manifesto

15 min • by Cory Ondrejka

A manifesto for what comes after software engineering in the age of AI agents. I really liked the 16 principles and how they reframe our profession around outcomes instead of code. From killing the backlog, to verifying reality, to coordinating agents like a new kind of org. It all makes sense.

🥈 One List to Rule Them All

8 min • by James Stanier

Another great piece by James. The power of a clear, short, and single list of priorities can’t be overstated. I also love the many examples included in the article. Recommended!

🥉 In Defense of Not Reading the Code

10 min • by Ben Shoemaker

When AI writes the code, your focus should shift from reviewing the code line by line to investing in the harness — specs, test infra, observability. This is the type of controversial-but-grounded article we desperately need more of.

4) Agentic Email

4 min • by Martin Fowler

A short reflection by Martin Fowler about giving LLMs access to your email. FWIW, with OpenClaw I do exactly what Martin suggests: read-only access + drafts for human review.

And that’s it for today! If you find this list useful, please share it with your friends!

Share

You can also read the very same things I read every day via this free daily digest 📬

See you next week!

Sincerely 👋
Luca

Every week I share the top articles I have found and personally read on the internet. I only share the stuff I believe it’s worth your time.

100% signal, 0% slop.

I mainly read things from my public daily digest, which curates an ever growing list of sources. Here is this week’s best stuff 👇

🌀 My Experience with OpenClaw

14 min • by Luca Rossi

This week I published a full write-up of how I use OpenClaw at Refactoring and in my personal life. It’s been a transformational tool for me, and I believe a lot of critics are missing the point. In the article I cover it all: workflows, security, and some hot takes about the future.

🥇 The AI Vampire

13 min • by Steve Yegge

AI makes you wildly more productive, but where does all that extra value go? If the company captures it all, you just burn out faster. A lot of great thinking by Steve Yegge here. A sneaky risk of AI isn’t that it replaces you, it’s that it drains you while you keep shipping more.

🥈 How I Use Claude Code to Ship Like a Team of Five

9 min • by Kieran Klaassen

This is one of the best and most practical explainers about how to use Claude Code that I have encountered. Kieran goes through his exact workflows, and even includes video explainers!

🥉 Context Engineering for Coding Agents

8 min • by Birgitta Böckeler (I interviewed Birgitta here)

A thorough overview of how to configure what your coding agent sees: reusable prompts, context interfaces, MCP servers, slash commands. Build context gradually rather than dumping everything upfront, and iterate on what works. Birgitta is a top authority on this, and it shows.

4) Three Bad Managers

10 min • by Rands

Three archetypes of terrible managers (but good leaders!): The Artist who doesn’t value humans, The Dictator who dominates every conversation, and The Knife who is… well, just a mess. You’ve probably worked for at least one of these, the lessons are in what not to do.

And that’s it for today! If you find this list useful, please share it with your friends!

Share

You can also read the very same things I read every day via this free daily digest 📬

See you next week!

Sincerely 👋
Luca

Every week I share the top articles I have found and personally read on the internet. I only share the stuff I believe it’s worth your time.

100% signal, 0% slop.

I mainly read things from my public daily digest, which curates an ever growing list of sources. Here is this week’s best stuff 👇

🌀 CTO Archetypes

26 min • by Pat Kua

This week I am honored to host an original article by Pat on Refactoring! He proposes a framework to reflect on CTOs’ scope and responsibilities, based on 8 archetypes. It’s great for CTOs to understand where they fit best, for planning your career, and for improving alignment during hiring.

🥇 Automatic Programming

2 min • by antirez

Stop calling it vibe coding. When it’s engineers doing it, Antirez suggests the better (imo) term automatic programming. Automatic programming produces vastly different results depending on the human guiding the process with their intuition, design, and continuous steering. Vibe coding, instead, means generating software without being part of the process at all

🥈 Notes on Claude Coding

3 min • by Andrej Karpathy

When Andrej Karpathy speaks, we listen. In just a few weeks, he went from 80% manual coding to 80% agent coding. Great note on how his workflow is changing and his thoughts about it.

🥉 Shipping at Inference-Speed

13 min • by Peter Steinberger

Peter is the guy behind the sensational OpenClaw. He wrote this blog post about a month ago, and he explained in detail how he writes code with AI. It’s a refreshing take where you won’t find complex orchestrations or multi-agent setups. Mostly common sense stuff by a single human developer.

4) How to Write a Good Spec for AI Agents

27 min • by Addy Osmani

This is a lengthy post where Addy provides a lot of detailed advice on how to work with agents. With respect to Peter’s piece, there is a lot less chaos and more guardrails — it’s a more structured approach that works better for consolidated teams.

And that’s it for today! If you find this list useful, please share it with your friends!

Share

You can also read the very same things I read every day via this free daily digest 📬

See you next week!

Sincerely 👋
Luca

Every week I share the top articles I have found and personally read on the internet. I only share the stuff I believe it’s worth your time.

100% signal, 0% slop.

I mainly read things from my public daily digest, which curates an ever growing list of sources. Here is this week’s best stuff 👇

🌀 The Listening Tour

10 min • by Luca Rossi

Yep, that’s me! Many asked why I don’t include the new articles I write on Refactoring here, and yeah, I should probably do that! The listening tour is about how to find bottlenecks and friction, by interviewing your engineers and mapping problems to your dev process.

🥇 How I Use Claude Code

5 min • by Boris Cherny

Boris Cherny is the creator of Claude Code, and in this thread on X he reveals how he uses it. Spoiler: the setup is pretty vanilla, which is refreshing. He also describes what the whole team shares and how they keep agents improving all the time.

🥈 Compound Engineering: How Every Codes With Agents

15 min • by Dan Shipper & Kieran Klaassen

Warning: this is a paid article, but I kept finding it linked everywhere so I subscribed to Every just to read it. In traditional engineering, every feature generally makes the next harder to build. The idea behind compound engineering is that you can reverse this: each feature should make the next easier, by means of a loop through which AI agents get better and better. This was very interesting and well-worth the sub.

🥉 How I Estimate Work as a Staff Software Engineer

12 min • by Sean Goedecke

It is not possible to accurately estimate software projects — but why? This is possibly the best article I have ever read about estimates. It talks about knowns, unknowns, and reversing the script.

4) It’s better not to continue everything

4 min • by Benedikt Kantus

Continuation is our default mode of operation, but what if we flipped it? Make stopping the default: every quarter or year, everything pauses automatically. Free yourself from the sunken cost fallacy and only invest in what makes sense now. Great read!

5) Long Desperation: An Investment Thesis

15 min • by Cerebus

A significant portion of young people have become economically imprisoned: when housing prices have tripled against incomes, student debt has skyrocketed, and AI threatens career paths, traditional compound interest advice falls apart. Desperate people turn to gambling high-variance financial products looking for agency. The author suggests investing in platforms that help with that, but instead I found myself wondering how to reverse the trend.

And that’s it for today! If you find this list useful, please share it with your friends!

Share

You can also read the very same things I read every day via this free daily digest 📬

See you next week!

Sincerely 👋
Luca

Every week I share the top articles I have found and personally read on the internet. I only share the stuff I believe it’s worth your time.

100% signal, 0% slop.

I mainly read things from my public daily digest, which curates an ever growing list of sources. Here is this week’s best stuff 👇

🥇 Welcome to Gas Town

33 min • by Steve Yegge

This was the best—and wildest—reading of my week. Gas Town is like Kubernetes for AI coding agents, only with more chaos and Mad Max names. It’s an extreme take on what AI coding can be, which is useful to explore in any case: even if you are not ready for it (I am not!) it informs your intuition about what’s happening on the frontier.

🥈 Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

8 min • by Antirez

This article is the best example of the idea that “smart people can hold two opposite ideas in your head”. Salvatore “Antirez” Sanfilippo, the creator of Redis (who I interviewed here), is not a fan of AI and doesn’t want it to succeed, but he doesn’t let that interfere with his judgment as a software professional about what’s the best way to perform his job:

it is now clear that for most projects, writing the code yourself is no longer sensible, if not to have fun.

🥉 This Might Be Oversharing

6 min • by James O’Malley

A candid piece about how the author’s social life collapsed post-pandemic — and how he intentionally rebooted it. It gave me a lot to think about and provided great insights on building community. Might inspire you to organize dinners!

4) One Bottleneck at a Time

7 min • by James Stanier

Great piece that builds on the famous The Goal, by Eliyahu Goldratt. Systems have one constraint that matters most, and focusing elsewhere is a wasted effort. Find the bottleneck (PRs piling up? Slow deploys?), put your best people on it, fix it, then move on to the next one.

5) I Sell Onions on the Internet

12 min • by Peter Askew

This is an old article, and pretty famous too. I stumbled upon it again after a long time, and it’s just a delightful story that comes from what seems like a different era of the internet, while instead it’s just five years ago. I enjoyed reading it again.

And that’s it for today! If you find this list useful, please share it with your friends!

Share

You can also read the very same things I read every day via this free daily digest 📬

See you next week!

Sincerely 👋
Luca

Every week I share the top articles I have found and personally read on the internet. I only share the stuff I believe it’s worth your time.

100% signal, 0% slop.

I mainly read things from my public daily digest, which curates an ever growing list of sources. Here is this week’s best stuff 👇

🥇 21 Lessons From 14 Years at Google

9 min • by Addy Osmani

This is really a great article with a lot of non-trivial and counterintuitive lessons. It’s also well written and everything is explained in a crisp and memorable way.

🥈 The Unbearable Joy of Sitting Alone in a Cafe

5 min • by Candost Dagdeviren

A reflection on the power of disconnection and solitude. I find myself more and more drawn to these kinds of experiences (and articles). I’ll probably try to do the same myself — going to a café without a phone!

🥉 Forest and Desert

2 min • by Kent Beck & Beth Andres-Beck

This is not a new article, but I read it again last week to use it in a presentation. It’s a really great analogy that explores a problem that rarely gets discussed: different teams live different realities, so there is a lot (good) advice that not only doesn’t work for some — it becomes harmful.

The last two articles I include are interesting because they present opposite theses. 👇

4) LLMs Are Not Fun

2 min • by Ori Bernstein

Ori explains how LLMs sucked the fun out of his job, because they took away 1) the joy of solving programming problems, and 2) the joy of management and coaching people, as you now spend more time “managing” LLMs than managing humans.

I see where Ori is coming from, but I think his feelings are based on a fallacy re: what his job is about. I wrote kind of a response to this piece in the latest Refactoring article:

• Finding Yourself in the AI Era

5) Web Development Is Fun Again

3 min • by Mattias Geniar

This is literally the opposite article than the one above. Mattias found renewed joy in programming with LLMs because they made it easier to make ideas come true, stripping away a lot of the stupid complexity brought in by the modern web.

And that’s it for today! If you find this list useful, please share it with your friends!

Share

You can also read the very same things I read every day via this free daily digest 📬

See you next week!

Sincerely 👋
Luca

Every week I share the top articles I have found and personally read on the internet. I only share the stuff I believe it’s worth your time.

100% signal, 0% slop.

I mainly read things from my public daily digest, which curates an ever growing list of sources. Here is this week’s best stuff 👇

🥇 The Move Faster Manifesto

5 min • by Brian Guthrie

Speed is all that matters in software. I am a speed purist, meaning that I believe you can optimize for speed and basically everything else falls into place. This is a great manifesto that explains why it is the case, and what we should mean when we say “speed”.

🥈 Coding is the Least Interesting Part of the Work

8 min • by Obie Fernandez

This is another article I wish I had written myself. For engineers, the most fun, interesting, and ultimately real work is what happens before you write code. Which is why you shouldn’t be worried if you are touching less code because of coding agents. Not only that: chances are, by spending more time on the thinking rather than the typing, AI can make you grow faster at your job.

🥉 Maybe the Default Settings Are Too High

8 min • by David Cain

A meditation on slowing down consumption — reading, eating, everything. Modern life pushes us to consume fast, which paradoxically diminishes rewards. Slowing down, conversely, enhances both comprehension and enjoyment. This is just the perfect read to start the new year.

4) A Month of Chat-Oriented Programming

15 min • by Nick Radcliffe

An honest, no-BS account of pair programming with Claude Code for a full month. You will find that almost every week I post one of these in this digest, and I’ll keep doing that: things change fast, and it’s important to get fresh takes all the time. Here the author got stressed and furious at times, but also produced way more code than they would have alone.

5) Why Does Development Slow?

5 min • by Kent Beck

Software projects start fast, then slow to a crawl — and AI coding assistants make it worse. Kent argues it’s all about options: each new feature reduces future flexibility. The solution is alternating between adding features and restoring optionality through code cleanup.

Also made me think about how we defined milestones in our guide about planning software: create milestones that 1) maximize progress and 2) minimize design space reduction.

And that’s it for today! If you find this list useful, please share it with your friends!

Share

You can also read the very same things I read every day via this free daily digest 📬

See you next week!

Sincerely 👋
Luca

Every week I share the top articles I have found and personally read on the internet. I only share the stuff I believe it’s worth your time.

100% signal, 0% slop.

I mainly read things from my public daily digest, which curates an ever growing list of sources. Here is this week’s best stuff 👇

🥇 Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life

4 min • by JA Westenberg

This time of the year always sparks some reflection, and I find myself drawn towards philosophical articles more than technical ones. I love the simple mental model presented here: a thick desire is one that changes you in the process of pursuing it; a thin desire is one that doesn’t. Time to focus on what matters!

🥈 Logging Sucks

30 min • by Boris Tane

Amazing primer about how to move from a logging to an observability mindset. The solution is wide events: single, rich objects that capture everything about a request. This is the article you will keep linking to your friends who ask about observability.

🥉 The Depopulation Trade

8 min • by Stefano Bernardi

Stefano is a smart VC who put together a thorough thesis about what the future may look like. It’s a worthy read. In a nutshell, population collapse is happening faster than anyone predicted. With fewer people, we’ll need to either increase births, import workers, or reduce the need for workers altogether. Guess which option tech and AI are betting on — and what that means for the future of work.

4) Why People Really Quit

3 min • by Kim Scott

Kim Scott, author of Radical Candor, is back at it with a great piece that identifies two mgmt failure modes: micromanagement and absentee management. The sweet spot is being a thought partner — actively involved but empowering. The recap table is a gem and I am attaching it here 👇

5) Claude, Chrome, Cloudflare

2 min • by Simon Willison

Real-world example of using the brand new Claude browser extension to navigate Cloudflare’s maze of a dashboard. Simon’s blog is the #1 resource to learn about AI & coding these days, and this quick—but useful—post confirms it.

And that’s it for today! If you find this list useful, please share it with your friends!

Share

You can also read the very same things I read every day via this free daily digest 📬

See you next week!

Sincerely 👋
Luca

Every week I share the top articles I have found. I only share stuff I have read (or tried if it’s a tool) and I believe it’s worth your time. 100% signal, 0% slop.

I mainly read things from my public daily digest, which curates an ever growing list of sources. Here is this week’s best stuff 👇

👓 Readings

🥇 Facilitating AI Adoption at Imprint

13 min • by Will Larson

This is a side-quest (to say the least) for every engineering leader right now. Will shares his working notes on how he is driving AI adoption at Imprint, with a lot of practical ideas and lessons learned.

🥈 Using LLMs at Oxide

8 min • by Oxide

This is the best manifesto about team LLM adoption I have seen. It covers values, patterns, and anti-patterns, covering everything from first principles. Chances are you can take it and almost copy-paste it for your team. It’s also the perfect complement to Will’s article above.

🥉 Useful Engineering Management Artifacts

5 min • by Bjorn Roche

A practical toolkit that also works as a checklist for everything you may need as an engineering manager. Career development plans, title ladders, team charters, roadmaps, and more — all the key docs that help you scale management without losing your mind.

4) Would You Pay to Have Your Resume Read?

4 min • by Pawel Brodzinski

Great piece about how AI has broken tech hiring. It’s become a game of prompting one AI agent to pass through the filters of another AI agent. So, what if candidates paid a small fee to guarantee a human actually reads their resume?

5) Deliberately Shaping Engineering Orgs

3 min • by Aviv Ben-Yosef

Great list of four failure modes that happen when you are not intentionally shaping your engineering org. A reminder that you need to carve out time to deliberately design your team’s future state.

🔧 Tools

Skippr Finesse

A cool Chrome extension that gives product feedback about the website you are on! Simple, well-executed idea.

Aura Ink

A color e-paper frame that looks just amazing. I am a sucker for digital stuff that blends into your home, and this is the epitome of that. Too bad it costs an arm and a leg 😂 ($450)

Echo

Promising tool (still in early access) that turns your inbox into a doc with the main actionable items. Maybe it’s because I tend to write docs this way myself (simple headings + bullet points) but I think there is a lot of potential in products that take something messy (e.g email) and use AI to turn it into a simple doc. It got me thinking about what other domains could get this treatment.

And that’s it for today! If you find this list useful, please share it with your friends!

Share

You can also read the very same things I read every day via this free daily digest 📬

See you next week!

Sincerely 👋
Luca

Here are this week’s top items 👇

👓 Readings

🥇 Frictionless

Book • by Nicole Forsgren & Abi Noda

I just finished reading the new book by Nicole Forsgren (co-author of Accelerate) and Abi Noda (co-founder of DX) about removing barriers that slow engineering teams down. I loved it — feels like the perfect follow up to Accelerate.

🥈 Increasing Your Luck Surface Area

2 min • by Jason Roberts

I stumbled on this while reviewing Umberto’s article on Refactoring, and loved it. Your luck is not random, it’s a function of doing things + telling people about them. The more you do, and the more you share, the more serendipity finds you.

🥉 Invert, Always Invert

10 min • by James Stanier

Charlie Munger’s classic mental model applied to engineering leadership. Instead of asking “how do I succeed?”, ask “how would I guarantee failure?” Then avoid those things. Very practical article with a lot of examples.

4) How Good Engineers Write Bad Code at Big Companies

8 min • by Sean Goedecke

Great take that connects the dots between bad code, short tenure, and incentives that prize shipping rather than maintaining. That’s how you get great engineers to write bad code. It’s a systemic issue, not a talent one.

5) Revisiting Manager READMEs

4 min • by Camille Fournier

Years after her famous critique of Manager READMEs, Camille revisits the topic. She argues that READMEs are not 100% bad, but you can easily do better by decentralizing the instructions into the respective processes and ceremonies. Make instructions less about you and more about what needs to be done.

🛠️ Tools

Fizzy

Couldn’t I leave out a new tool from 37signals? Nope. Fizzy is a very opinionated take on Kanban. In a nutshell, it’s about keeping momentum, keeping lists fresh, and avoiding long backlogs. It’s peak 37signals philosophy, but the design is extremely polarizing and will not appeal to everyone!

PGlite

Full Postgres running in your browser via WASM. Just 3.7MB compressed. So cool! Useful for local-first apps, demos, or anywhere you need a real database without a server.

Pylar

Sensible middleware to give AI agents safe access to your structured data sources — i.e. databases. You can create governed SQL views, build MCP tools, and deploy to popular agent builder. For teams (legitimately) worried about letting LLMs loose on their dbs.

And that’s it for today! If you find this list useful, please share it with your friends!

Share

You can also read the very same things I read every day via this free daily digest 📬

See you next week!

Sincerely 👋
Luca