Daily Reading List – February 20, 2026 (#726)

Finally flying home after a terrific week in India. Today I had the chance to talk to startup founders and community leaders to share Google’s plans and hear what they’re thinking about.

[blog] 5 key takeaways from the 2026 State of Software Delivery. Creating more code, and shipping less often? A small number of people are getting AI-generated code to prod quickly, but most are struggling to ship at speed.

[blog] Cloud Run Services: A Practical Guide to Getting More Bang for Your Buck. It’s one thing to use a service for a few minutes while experimenting. But, what types of configurations matter most when you’re sticking with a cloud service for a while? Good advice here.

[blog] 14 More Lessons from 14 years at Google. All lessons don’t apply to every person or situation, but I’m hard pressed to see how these aren’t relevant to all of us.

[article] How tech chiefs gauge ROI on AI. This looks like mature thinking about what tools can and cannot be responsible for.

[blog] The Secret Sauce of Reliable AI: Implementing Robust Pre/Post-Processing Hooks. Useful insight that I will try to remember more often. We have more capabilities at our disposal if we choose to use them!

[article] When Every Company Can Use the Same AI Models, Context Becomes a Competitive Advantage. Get your data management and context engineering efforts running at full speed if you hope to get legit value from AI.

[blog] What are the Trends in Agent Discoverability and Interoperability? This might seem like low-level content, but given how fast standards are changing, it’s important to know what’s going on.

[blog] How we reduced the size of our Agent Go binaries by up to 77%. It’s not hard for software to get bloated over time. Datadog has a nice post about how they made an intentional effort to strip out old dependencies, dead code, and other things that made their agent too hefty.

[article] Google Gemini 3.1 Pro first impressions: a ‘Deep Think Mini’ with adjustable reasoning on demand. Some thorough analysis of our latest model drop.

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