The top things I have read this week 🏆
Week 33 / 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 👇
💸 Why pay 4x more for AI work?
This newsletter is brought to you by our friends at Glean.
Glean connects knowledge, systems, and context so AI can actually work, and do so in a very cost-effective way.
They just ran the same tasks at $0.45/task vs $1.84/task on Claude Cowork. They got there by routing work, keeping context tight, and saving the expensive model for the jobs that need it.
🌀 The Case for Hiring Junior Engineers 🌱
8 min • by Luca Rossi
AI has made small, senior-heavy teams fashionable. I think that’s a business mistake. Junior engineers bring adaptability, energy, and a talent pipeline that compounds, provided you give them the guardrails and feedback they need to grow.
In this week article I try to make a strong case for hiring juniors and mixing seniority in your teams!
🥇 The People Who Will Thrive in the AI Age
15 min • by David Brooks
When intelligence is abundant, the advantage shifts to people who still want to think hard.
David calls them “mental marathoners”: people who use AI to stretch their abilities rather than avoid effort. I loved this framing. It also explains why the same tools can make one person sharper and another more passive.
🥈 Middle management roles are also a trap
2 min • by Will Larson
Middle management teaches you to balance pressure and operate organizational process. Will argues that it can also pull you away from some of the skills executives need most: domain expertise and driving execution.
A good warning for anyone assuming that every step up the management ladder prepares you for the next one. It’s not always the case.
🥉 “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
6 min • by Senko Rašić
Senko makes a strong case against the “code was never the hard part” phrase that you see everywhere these days. I half-agree with him.
I mean, understanding users, deciding what to build, and translating that into requirements is hard. Writing good code is hard, too. The difficulty level depends a lot on which company you work for: there are companies in which coding is extremely hard, and others where it’s easier.
I don’t think this is a super useful debate anyway, let’s just agree coding is hard in general!
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