Daily Reading List – January 8, 2026 (#696)

It was nice getting a holiday break from writing newsletters, but I’ve got two to pump out tomorrow. Time to dust off some humiliating personal stories and non sequiturs to jazz up the content.

[blog] High-Performance Spring Boot on Cloud Run with DDD, Clean Architecture, and GraalVM. I do read more than just AI stuff, I promise. Mazlum shows us how to build a nicely optimized Java app (structurally, and package-wise).

[article] Boston Dynamics unveils production-ready version of Atlas robot at CES 2026. The robots are coming. This one is focused on industrial tasks, and possibly dancing.

[article] Generative UI: The AI agent is the front end. I’m paying close attention to this space. It’s far from mature, but the possibility of personalized and dynamic UIs (that replace billions of lines of static frontend code) is interesting.

[blog] Virtual machines still run the world. Always a good reminder. Container use is growing, but it’s still dwarfed by the widespread deployment of VMs.

[blog] Instant insights: Gemini CLI’s New Pre-Configured Monitoring Dashboards. Light up this telemetry in your agentic CLI to see insights into token use, daily users, tool calls, and performance.

[article] Why AI Boosts Creativity for Some Employees but Not Others. Those with well-developed metacognition (ability to plan, refine thinking, etc) do better with AI than those who haven’t built that skill.

[blog] The economics of technical speaking. This doesn’t get talked about. Maybe it should. Your time is worth something and too many speakers do it for free.

[blog] Goodbye Plugins: MCP Is Becoming the Universal Interface for AI. I don’t know if MCP is the best long-term thing, but I like that I don’t need to understand the API (operations and payloads) of every random system I want to interface with.

[blog] 5 Examples of Excellent MCP Server Documentation. What makes good documentation for MCP servers? I liked what was called out here.

[blog] Gmail is entering the Gemini era. I know that some vendors are adding AI features in a clunky way. This doesn’t feel like that to me.

[blog] AI isn’t “just predicting the next word” anymore. An LLM may be predicting tokens, but AI systems that store state, do reasoning loops and more are giving us sophisticated responses.

Want to get this update sent to you every day? Subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email below: