Daily Reading List – August 11, 2025 (#606)

Did your week start off fast, or are you able to ease in? I had a mix of both. Today’s reading list has the requisite amount of AI content, but also some non-AI content that I think you’ll like.

[article] Do not Interrupt Developers, Study Says. Keep devs in a flow state. Reduce meetings and interruptions if you’re actually serious about productivity!

[blog] Coding for the Future Agentic World. Take a couple of minutes and go through this. It’s worth it. Addy wrote an excellent tour of the tooling and practices that make up today’s agentic coding world.

[blog] Goodbye API Keys: Gemini CLI GitHub Actions with Workload Identity Federation. API keys are easy to use, but not a great long-term strategy. This is a good post about creating a more responsible security story.

[blog] The Future Isn’t Model Agnostic. I guess this qualifies as a hot take, but it shouldn’t. Model swapping isn’t trivial and you end up optimizing for the wrong things.

[blog] Seamless Istio Upgrades at Scale. Good story. Anyone can deploy things nowadays. It takes planning and skill to cleanly upgrade what’s been deployed.

[blog] Using GKE to Build a Developer-First Internal Platform. Kubernetes is boring now. Which is great! That means it’s widely adopted, mature, and trusted for a variety of workloads.

[article] The Future of Product Management Is AI-Native. I liked the insights here, especially around shared AI work among team members.

[article] Kubernetes Will Solve YAML Headaches with KYAML. Were you aware of this? I was not. There’s a new subset of YAML coming to Kubernetes.

[blog] Run OpenAI’s new gpt-oss model at scale with Google Kubernetes Engine. And go ahead and run OpenAI’s new open model on our Kubernetes. That’s not a sentence I thought I’d write two months ago.

[blog] The Most Underrated Performance Enhancer: Having Fun. I tend to say that I’m not a serious person, but I’m very serious about my work. Tense leaders make tense teams.

[article] The advantages of stack-based internal developer platforms. This is an approach where devs can self-service infra from a set of templates that include all the components for shipping and managing apps.

[blog] Why OpenAPI Should Be The Foundation For Your MCP Server. Use an OpenAI spec to bootstrap your MCP server? I can see the merits, but it’d be easy to accidentally do a 1:1 mapping of operations to tools, without thinking through higher order tool types.

[article] GitHub CEO To Step Down As Company Is More Tightly Embraced by Microsoft’s CoreAI Team. I suspect this will lead to a ripple effect. Any attempt to retain independence within GitHub seems like it’ll be a challenge. More here.

[blog] Gemini CLI Tutorial Series — Part 8: Building your own MCP Server. Speaking of MCP servers, this is a very good post about creating, testing, and using your own.

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