Daily Reading List – July 31, 2025 (#599)

Vacation (at home) with kids is fun, but I’ll need another vacation after this. Today we went to the Del Mar racetrack to watch the horse races. And I’m a big baseball fan, so I was tense watching today’s trade deadline. The San Diego Padres were silly active.

[blog] Being a good PM at Google. Marvelous piece from Chris that applies to anyone wanting to be a premier product manager, anywhere.

[blog] How to evaluate vibe coding tools for your enterprise. This post attempts to categorize the current crop of AI tools, who they help, and what enterprises should look for.

[blog] An Engineer’s Guide to AI Code Model Evals. I see a lot of people use feelings to describe their opinions about AI-assisted tools. Feels fast. Feels slow. Feels like it gets worse. Addy looks at what a more objective eval of an AI coding model looks like.

[blog] Evaluating Agents with ADK, Part 1: The development loop with the ADK Web UI. Let’s keep the evals conversation going. Ivan covers the manual steps of assessing the flow of an AI agent.

[blog] Don’t Tell Engineers What to Do. It’s not a free-for-all. You don’t get to do whatever you want. But managers should be setting priorities (what to work on) and empowering the team to solve things the most responsible way.

[blog] Announcing a complete developer toolkit for scaling A2A agents on Google Cloud. Lots of updates for those who want to build and distribute agents.

[blog] How to Build an MCP Server with Gemini CLI and Go. Some fantastic lessons here from Daniela as she leaps hurdles and documents how she made the jumps.

[blog] How to Secure MCP Servers. If you must use MCP servers, then look at advice such as this to set them up securely.

[blog] AI is Eating Developer Experience. It’s being added everywhere to it, yes. If used to make things better (versus using it to use it), the team will thank you.

[blog] Gemini CLI: Custom slash commands. Here’s a simple way to access reusable prompts from our agentic CLI tool.

[blog] Pivoting From Software Engineer in Google, My First 3 Months. I like Annie’s story and have enjoyed her work so far. Here, she looks at what’s different when moving from software engineering into a developer relations engineering role.

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