Daily Reading List – October 31, 2025 (#656)

That’s a wrap on the week, and the month. Tonight I’ll chase my kids around the neighborhood for Halloween, and “borrow” some of the top-tier candy they acquire. Don’t judge me.

[blog] Spec-Driven Development: 10 things you need to know about specs. This post contains some very good questions to consider. It’ll be easy for us to over-index on specs and accidentally re-create waterfall development!

[blog] What do we think of GitHub saying there are 180m developers in the world? It’s fine. They’re counting anyone with a GH account which is generous. But the macro point is that there are more builders out there, using all sorts of tools.

[blog] Analyze anything with AI-powered SQL in BigQuery. I really love this feature. So much that I tried it out today and did a tweetstorm about it.

[blog] Build a Retail Agent with MCP Toolbox, YugabyteDB, and Google ADK. You can fulfill one of these sorts of sneaky-powerful use cases in minutes and hours nowadays. Wild.

[blog] StreetReaderAI: Towards making street view accessible via context-aware multimodal AI. We’ll keep doing commercial stuff to pay the bills, but here’s another great case of AI research that might have a massive impact on those who are blind or vision impaired.

[blog] Google Cloud Assist Investigations: AI-Powered Root Cause Analysis. “I don’t know where to start” is going to be a question we ask ourselves less and less often. Ops team RIGHT NOW can get an AI assist before they even start troubleshooting.

[blog] Survey: Two-thirds of AI-native startups let AI write most of their code. I’d assume these shops will need that AI-assisted troubleshooting if they run these apps long enough for it to matter!

[blog] Tool descriptions are eating up all your AI tokens (but they don’t have to). Good points by Craig here. It’s super easy to eat up 100k tokens just on processing the available MCP tools.

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