The top things I found this week! 🏆

Week 1 / 2026

Hey there! Welcome to a new edition of Hybrid Hacker, and happy new year! 🌟

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 👇

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🥇 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”.

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🥈 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.

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🥉 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.

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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.

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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.

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

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

See you next week!

Sincerely 👋
Luca