Daily Reading List – July 15, 2025 (#587)

A lot of AI stuff today. But also lots of insight about it, versus cheerleading. Dig in!

[blog] Context Engineering: Bringing Engineering Discipline to Prompts. This post gave me greater appreciation for what “context engineering” is about. Don’t assume it’s just a silly new term for something we were already doing.

[blog] AI from Google Cloud steps up to the plate at the MLB All-Star Game. The game’s tonight, and we’re adding a few cool experiences to the game.

[blog] Starter GEMINI.md file within a project directory for Gemini CLI. Pay attention to these posts that help us write effective agent instructions that improve the output of our tools.

[blog] The three great virtues of an AI-assisted programmer. What are you doing while waiting for your LLM to answer? How are you keeping control of the exercise? I liked Sean’s take here.

[article] The Pragmatic Engineer 2025 Survey: What’s in your tech stack? Surveys are surveys, but there’s data here that might validate (or invalidate) some of your assumptions about today’s developers.

[article] AI coding tools are shifting to a surprising place: the terminal. The survey above happened during April and May. I suspect the data would already look markedly different thanks to the rapid (and sustainable) rise in agentic terminal tools.

[blog] The Internal Platform Scorecard: Speed, Safety, Efficiency, and Scalability. I like the attributes along with corresponding KPIs and metrics that matter. Know how you’re measuring the success of your platform!

[blog] Gemini CLI Tutorial Series — Part 6 : More MCP Servers. Even more ways to use MCP servers in the Gemini CLI, including accessing Google Workspace and media services.

[blog] Next-Level Data Automation: Gemini CLI, Google Sheets, and MCP. Interacting with Google Sheets, Docs, and Slides from an agentic CLI opens up a ton of possibilities.

[blog] Tools: Code Is All You Need. A contrary opinion to the MCP hype. Maybe just use code instead?

[blog] The AWS Survival Guide for 2025: A Field Manual for the Brave and the Bankrupt. Amusing. You don’t have to put up with all this if you want a better cloud alternative.

[blog] AI Engineers and the Hot Vibe Code Summer. When I hear “AI engineer” I think of someone building AI models or doing ML work. Not a developer using AI tools. Kate looks at that term, and vibe coding to figure out what it all means.

[article] Global IT spend keeps growing despite trade war concerns. Spending still up for the year, but trimmed expectations. El Reg has a more pessimistic take on the same data.

[blog] The Fastest Way to Run the Gemini CLI: A Deep Dive into Package Managers. Super interesting content, especially if you care about performance.

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