Daily Reading List – February 4, 2026 (#714)

Today I was impressed by so many thought-provoking articles and blogs. Maybe the most all year so far!

[article] Google parent beats on revenue, projects significant AI spending increase. Wowza, Cloud had a remarkable quarter (and year). We’re doing a few things right over here.

[article] How should AI agents consume external data? It’s a good question and one I haven’t seen discussed much. Locked down data sources? APIs? Secured caches? Make sure you have some gateways in front.

[article] Leaders, gainers and unexpected winners in the Enterprise AI arms race. It’s early, of course, but there are signals about who the real players are. Interesting to see third party apps GROWING in the enterprise.

[lab] Build and Deploy to Google Cloud with Antigravity. I clicked through this new step-by-step tutorial. It’s an excellent way to see how AI can help with more than just generating new code.

[article] Shared memory is the missing layer in AI orchestration. This has been on my mind a lot. What type of shared knowledge/memory should be stored, who should access it, and how is it fed into tools and apps?

[blog] Self-Improving Coding Agents. Speaking of memory, this excellent post from Addy highlights the value of the “right” memories passed between iterations of agentic loops.

[blog] Advancing AI benchmarking with Game Arena. Why not use games to really test the decision-making of AI models?

[article] My View of Software Engineering Has Changed For Good. It’s unavoidable at this point. Fairly soon, if not already, it’s not going to make much sense to sling all the code yourself.

[article] Most People Can’t Vibe Code. Here’s How We Fix That. Even with millions of new “builders” out there, there’s still a lot of assumed knowledge about software that many don’t have. Do we need different surfaces and platforms than what we have now?

[blog] AI Slopageddon and the OSS Maintainers. With all these new builders, however, we’re breaking open source workflows and maintainer morale.

[blog] Researching Topics in the Age of AI — Rock-Solid Webhooks Case Study. Should we share our AI-driven research reports publicly? Does that contribute to the “slop” problem? Or when guided well, do these reports represent useful knowledge worth disseminating? I lean towards the latter.

[article] How Do Workers Develop Good Judgment in the AI Era? Great question. How do you get good judgement without experience? We have to redesign how we develop that judgement.

[blog] MCP Development with COBOL, Cloud Run, and Gemini CLI. The fact that you can even do this is the takeaway. Not that you should start building MCP servers with COBOL.

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