Daily Reading List – December 16, 2025 (#686)

It was a good day, and the Christmas break is on the horizon. I’ve got a blog post ready to publish tomorrow, so keep an eye out for that.

[article] AI, MCP, and the Hidden Costs of Data Hoarding. Good name for it. Now that it’s so simple to shove gobs of context into an LLM, are we losing key skills?

[blog] Cloud CISO Perspectives: Our 2026 Cybersecurity Forecast report. Read this for some smart perspectives from heavy-hitters in the security domain.

[article] Being an architect isn’t the sum of skills. It’s the product. Gregor offers up some useful perspective on what architects need to be skilled at.

[blog] 8 ways to make the most out of Slide Decks in NotebookLM. You’re going to have work extra hard to make terrible slides. It’s gotten too easy to do a nice job.

[blog] More on Context Management in AI Products. Luke’s been publishing good content on UI design for AI-based services.

[blog] ADK Agents on GKE with Self-Hosted LLMs & vLLM. Yes, your open model and AI agents can run in the same place. Here’s a guide for setting them up on Kubernetes.

[article] 5 engineering dogmas it’s time to retire. Ooh, this could start some debate among your tech friends. No practice should be untouchable and I wonder how many of these you’ve revisited in the past couple years.

[article] What Is Google’s Agent Development Kit? An Architectural Tour. Here’s a good walkthrough for those expanding their knowledge about the agent frameworks out there.

[blog] Prototypes are the new PRDs. Build more, write less. Or at least up front. Use prototypes to test out ideas and then document your findings.

[blog] How Temporal Powers Reliable Cloud Operations at Netflix. A decade ago, it seemed everyone wanted to copy the Netflix tech stack. Not so much now, but they still make good choices that are worth reviewing.

[blog] GRL: Turning verifiable games into a post-training suite for LLM agents with Tunix on TPUs. Can game environments help train the next generation of agents? People at my alma mater have done something pretty cool!

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