Daily Reading List – January 20, 2026 (#703)

Happy pretend Monday. Since yesterday was a US holiday, I’ll be thrown off all week. But, today was maybe my favorite reading list of the year so far. Some really fun items.

[blog] How Our Engineering Team Uses AI. Here’s how a startup engineering team uses AI for understanding codebases, explore ideas, write scripts, and outsource toil. They also call out where AI isn’t making a big difference.

[blog] How we built an AI-first culture at Ably. You might have to mandate it to force the habit change, but AI adoption often becomes organic once people see where the value is. This post offers good pillars for successful AI adoption.

[blog] Everything Becomes an Agent. Will every AI project, given enough time, converge on becoming an agent? Allen thinks so.

[report] State of MCP. I don’t think I’ve seen this much data about MCP usage. Check it out for early signals on patterns, pain points, and value.

[blog] The Power of Constraints. Constraints are freeing. Some of the best people use their present limitations to do amazing things within those (often temporary) boundaries.

[blog] The Flexibility Fallacy: How We Confused Developer Choice with Developer Productivity. Completely related to the previous post. The best teams don’t have the most choices. They have the right constraints in place.

[blog] How Google Antigravity is changing spec-driven development. There’s a lot still happening in this space. Far from mature. But track the progress!

[article] Demystifying evals for AI agents. Anthropic put out some terrific content here that will put you in better shape when designing and running evaluations of your agents.

[blog] The Question Your Observability Vendor Won’t Answer. How much of your data is waste? Up to 40%. You’re paying way too much right now.

[article] The Agentic AI Handbook: Production-Ready Patterns. Dig through 113 patterns to see if any can help you out.

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