Daily Reading List – September 16, 2025 (#628)

Each year, we have an internal conference for the technical writers at Google. I got to keynote today’s session, and it was fun to reflect on what will stay the same, and what will change in the years ahead. These daily reading lists have influenced a lot of my thinking!

[blog] Powering AI commerce with the new Agent Payments Protocol (AP2). This changes things. Would people really trusted unattended agents to perform payment transactions? This new protocol establishes a foundation of trust, and is backed by the companies that matter here. News here too.

[blog] Announcing Tessl’s Products to Unlock the Power of Agents. We’ve seen the early wild-west days of building apps using AI tools, and now the grown-ups are here. This is a product to do more responsible spec-driven development. Sounds good to me.

[blog] Kubernetes 1.34 is available on GKE! This is a short, human-readable summary of what mattered in this latest Kubernetes release.

[article] Oracle Delivers Java 25 Edition of Venerable Programming Language for the AI Era. Java 25 is here, and this language continues to be one of the most relevant in our industry. More coverage here.

[blog] A framework for pricing AI products. It’s not hard to get this wrong, so I appreciate Stripe offering some useful advice on how to think about charging for your AI product.

[blog] The Anatomy of an AI Agent. Good foundational thinking from Allen. The agent is where the next leap comes from. The models alone were never going to change the game.

[article] 15 Best Practices for Building MCP Servers in Production. I don’t know if there are any “best” practices yet, but there are at least good practices that we’ve discovered so far.

[ebook] Building Intelligent Agents with Google ADK. All online and free to access. Great content here on building AI agents using the open source Agent Development Kit.

[blog] Test state, not interactions. Good reminder, especially if you’re leaning on AI to crank out a massive number of unit tests that give you false confidence.

[blog] How to Write Better Python with Ruff on Google Cloud. It seems that with so many folks focused on Python, it’s getting some better developer tooling.

[article] 2-agent architecture: Separating context from execution in AI systems. Here’s some knowledge acquired through experience. When do you introduce a second agent to the architecture? I liked the idea of a context-gathering agent and a real-time agent.

[blog] Learn Your Way: Reimagining textbooks with generative AI. This speaks to me, and I’m fairly convinced it represents the future of education overall. Take trusted, static content and personalize for individual learners.

[blog] Beyond the Horizon: How Angular is Embracing AI for Next-Gen Apps. Angular is doing its thing, and bringing a few new ideas to the table.

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