Daily Reading List – March 27, 2026 (#751)

It’s baseball’s Opening Weekend and I’ll be at one of the San Diego Padres games. If you don’t like baseball it’s ok. We’ll still be friends. Probably.

[article] What we wish we knew about building AI agents. Do you need an agent, or just an MCP server? Should you build a custom harness? This and more in this insightful post.

[blog] How did Google turn AI IDE features into measurable productivity gains? Check out this analysis of our research report where we showed that productivity gains didn’t come from a single model upgrade, but but improving all layers of the funnel/stack.

[article] Leaders Underestimate the Value of Employee Joy. It’s true. And you can’t fake it as a leader. Recognizing that serving emotional needs drives better team performance is an unlock code.

[blog] Closing the knowledge gap with agent skills. How well do skills work? Well, but we’re still learning the best way to employ them. I liked the perspective in this post about our new agent skill for Gemini.

[article] Is the FDE role becoming less desirable? Maybe Forward Deployed Engineers are being asked to serve as sales engineers instead. That’s what Gergely looks at here.

[blog] Generating music with Lyria 3 and the Gemini Interactions Java SDK. I’m still amazed by what we can create with just a few lines of code.

[blog] Reducing our monorepo size to improve developer velocity. There are benefits and risks of a monorepo. Dropbox shrunk theirs and saw faster cloning and more reliable CI pipelines.

[blog] Next.js Deployment Adapters: A bright future for Next.js on Google Cloud. We’re part of a consortium that’s making Next.js better in more runtimes, including Firebase.

[blog] Top 3 Everyday Angular Tasks That MCP Servers Automate for You. Faster starting points. That’s a great value prop of a good tool. These are good examples of where this MCP server gets you going (and iterating) faster.

[blog] Introducing Wiz Agents & Workflows: Security at the Speed of AI. These Wiz folks might be on to something. These offensive, defensive, and resolution agents look powerful.

[article] From Friction to Flow: How Great DevEx Makes Everything Awesome. Few people have studied and understood developer experience as much as Nicole. Learn how to remove friction from your team’s work.

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