Daily Reading List – December 18, 2025 (#688)

I’m giving you a giant reading list today. I don’t know how it happened, but let’s not ask too many questions. Dig in!

[article] AI Coding Tools in 2025: Welcome to the Agentic CLI Era. This was definitely a big year for software development tools. Who knows what’s next.

[blog] Conductor: Introducing context-driven development for Gemini CLI. Spec-driven development is only a few months old, but I’m actually a big fan of this quick evolution to CONTEXT-driven development. Especially for work on existing projects.

[article] Why Google’s new Interactions API is such a big deal for AI developers. Is a “stateful” approach to LLM interactions a missing piece for many developers? This article calls out Gemini acting more like a “remote operating system” now than a stateless LLM.

[article] Your New Role Requires Strategic Thinking…But You’re Stuck in the Weeds. Speaking from experience, this can be hard to do. Especially when you enjoy the weeds. But that’s not where a leader adds the most value.

[blog] In The AI Era, The Value Of A Research Firm Is Still Largely Human. Analyst firms are in need of a PR blitz. And this point is true on the whole, but the old way of delivering value isn’t worth the cost. Change is required.

[blog] Quick & Easy AlloyDB AI Setup Tool. Great work from Abi taking some of the intimidating parts of AlloyDB database setup (VPC setup, peering) and automates it away.

[blog] AI’s real superpower: consuming, not creating. Creation by AI can be done faster than humans, but we’re capable of the same work. But when it comes to consuming tons of content and making sense of it, AI is doing what humans physically cannot.

[blog] FunctionGemma: Bringing bespoke function calling to the edge. Here’s another specialized version of our lightweight open model that’s tuned for function calling.

[article] How differently do software developers perceive the same communication? You think everyone received your message the same way? Think again. Up to 2/3s of the messages risk being perceived differently than intended.

[blog] Building A2A Agents with Gemini 3 and the GO Agent Development Kit (ADK). William has been on a tear with agent posts, and this one shows us how to create multi-agent systems in Go.

[article] Vibe-coding startup Lovable raises $330M at a $6.6B valuation. There’s money in vibe coding! Google pitched in on this one.

[blog] Automate AI and HPC clusters with Cluster Director, now generally available. A good number of companies are trying to stitch together compute clusters for AI/ML training or HPC workloads. We’ve now made that easier.

[blog] Why “Microservices” Debates Miss the Point. You can introduce poor coupling and design into any architecture. Let’s learn to avoid it, especially as we start doing multi-agent systems!

[blog] Getting AI to write good SQL: Optimizing the AlloyDB AI natural language API for your use case. Getting to ~100% accuracy on natural language to SQL? It’s somewhat required to get business trust for key scenarios. Here’s our journey.

[blog] The Top Ten Highlights from Flutter & Dart in 2025. Big year for this pair, and 2026 could be even better. AI generates good Flutter code, and creating cross-platform apps will continue to be a valuable use case next year.

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