The top things I have read this week 🏆
Week 5 / 2025
Hey there! Welcome to a new edition of Hybrid Hacker! 🌟
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!
You can also read the very same things I read every day via this free daily digest 📬
See you next week!
Sincerely 👋
Luca
Thanks for the shout out!