Daily Reading List – July 8, 2025 (#582)

Today’s list had a good variety of contrarian takes. I’m unabashedly an AI optimist (even if that means Redditors think I’m an idiot), but I absorb a variety of points of view to try and stay grounded. And, I try to use most of the things I talk about in order avoid irrational optimism.

[blog] AI-Assisted Legacy Code Modernization: A Developer’s Guide. I’ve been studying this topic lately (how AI contributes to code modernization), and liked this post.

[blog] The Future of Engineering Leadership. Excellent advice. Becoming closer to the code, becoming more strategic, focusing on the business, and being an attentive leader are all important (required?) moving forward.

[blog] Announcing Vertex AI Agent Engine Memory Bank available for everyone in preview. Hey now, a fully managed memory service for your AI agents? This looks convenient to use, and works with multiple AI agent frameworks.

[article] Everyone in tech has an opinion about Soham Parekh. This was a wild story at the end of last week that had about a 36 hour news cycle.

[blog] Writing Code Was Never The Bottleneck. Code understanding is the hard part. Great take here.

[blog] Stop Building AI Agents. Now for some counter-programming to all the agent hype. Basically, don’t start with agents when simpler patterns are better.

[blog] Autonomous testing and the future of developer productivity. My friend Bryan just started at a very interesting company, and I’m glad to see him writing about topics like this.

[article] Technical debt is just an excuse. Spicy take! If you didn’t/don’t have explicit work planned to fix previous shortcuts, don’t call it “tech debt.” It’s just bad code from making bad decisions.

[blog] Taming agentic engineering – Prompts are code, .json/.md files are state. Fantastic piece that lays out a way of thinking about “programming” these LLMs and using state files to your advantage.

[article] Expectations for Agentic Coding Tools: Testing Gemini CLI. Speaking of agentic coding tools, The New Stack puts the Gemini CLI through the paces.

[article] Context Engineering Guide. Here’s an in-depth look at a concept that’s quickly growing in relevance. You might hate all these emerging terms, but look past that and study the ideas.

[blog] Improve your coding flow with Gemini Code Assist, Gemini CLI and Gitlab. Agents in the IDE are helpful, and adding MCP servers that talk to your source repo make them even more helpful.

[article] 30 Years of JavaScript: 10 Milestones That Changed the Web. Such an important technology. It was fun to see this look at how we got to where we are now.

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