Daily Reading List – January 26, 2026 (#707)

I’m flying up to San Jose in a few moments, and spent some free time this weekend building a demo that showcases the AI-first product development lifecycle. It goes from research to planning to building and deploying to operations. Figured I can’t talk about it if I hadn’t tried it myself!

[article] How MCP Server Help AI Act. Quick piece, but it’s a good reminder of what MCP can do for you. I used a couple of servers this past weekend to finish a project faster.

[blog] High-Risk, High-Scale: Guaranteeing Ad Budget Precision at 1 Million Events/Second. Every architecture won’t look like yours, but we can still learn from use cases that don’t directly apply to us.

[blog] Just for Fun: Migrating a legacy Spring Boot application with Conductor in Gemini CLI. Daniel takes a dusty Spring Boot app and shows us the flow to genuinely modernize it with our agentic CLI. Great flow.

[blog] 2026 Predictions from the Battery Team. Everybody’s got an angle, but I like VC predictions given how close they are to what’s relevant in the moment.

[blog] I’m addicted to being useful. Me too, but I’ve also found it’s important to be useful where needed, not everywhere. Sometimes I just need to listen, or watch things play out.

[blog] Improving workflow orchestration with Apache Airflow 3.1 in Cloud Composer. Other software, non-AI software, continues to hum along. The latest version of Airflow for data processing is available on Google Cloud.

[article] Engineering as Humanity’s Highest Achievement. I’m a huge nerd for giant engineering projects. I love them. Keep building!

[article] Pushing the Agentic Frontier with Ephemeral Messages. Very cool original idea from our Google Antigravity team. This seems to make a big difference in how well the IDE follows instructions over long conversations.

[article] 16 open source projects transforming AI and machine learning. Here’s a timely list, with a couple things I hadn’t heard of yet.

[blog] Beyond Buy vs Build: A new choice in the world of enterprise software. Lak’s “fourth path” is interesting. Will vertical AI startups generate custom software, saving customers from vibe coding custom SaaS?

[blog] Stop Calling It “Vibe Coding” — It’s Supervised Generation. The “let AI generate everything without watching” crowd is excited right now, but Tim provides a sensible reminder.

[article] Kubernetes 1.35 features that change Day 2 operations. What’s new for platform folks running Kubernetes? Jani covers it well here.

Want to get this update sent to you every day? Subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email below: