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 👇
🌀 How to Design a Good MCP Server 🔌
11 min • by Luca Rossi
In this week’s essay, I wrote about what separates a good MCP server from a thin wrapper over your API: designing tools around jobs instead of endpoints, treating the agent as a different kind of caller, and the less obvious work of running one in production.
🥇 If Your Team Is Happy, Are You Doing a Good Job?
9 min • by Charity Majors
Charity goes back to the ZIRP-era belief that if your team is happy, you are doing a good job, and explains how psychological safety drifted from being about learning and performance to being about never feeling bad at work.
I agree with her that frustrating people and telling them no is part of a manager’s job, because growth is often uncomfortable. Great read, and part of a longer conversation with Cat Hicks that is worth catching up with.
🥈 Software’s Centaur Age May Last Decades
5 min • by Sean Goedecke
Sean argues we are living in the centaur age of software, where engineers paired with AI beat both unassisted engineers and unsupervised agents, and that this phase may last decades, like it did in chess.
I don’t know if he is right about the timeline (nobody really does), but I like his advice a lot: don’t jump ship early, and spend your energy figuring out what value humans still add.
🥉 How Do AI Coding Assistants Change the Shape of Eng Work?
4 min • by Lizzie Matusov
Lizzie covers a six-month study on how AI assistants reshape engineers’ days, and the results are mixed: perceived productivity held at 84%, but the share of engineers reporting a worse developer experience nearly doubled, from 14% to 27%.
Time moved from writing code to directing and checking AI output, and focus took the hardest hit. I liked the practical advice at the end, especially batching AI review into set blocks and keeping design work and hard debugging on separate, protected time.
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