The top things I have read this week 🏆
Week 14 / 2026
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 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!
You can also read the very same things I read every day via this free daily digest 📬
See you next week!
Sincerely 👋
Luca