Daily Reading List – May 22, 2026 (#790)

We’ve got a holiday weekend here in the US. It’s a good chance for me to take a breather after a couple of large events, and before doing a couple more in Europe.

[blog] AI and the New Business Moat: Defending Your Competitive Advantage. Is your company “moving the moat” given what AI is capable of doing itself? Double down on unique data? Deepen your expertise? Jason offers good ideas.

[blog] Scaling Software Architecture Without Overengineering. Great points here from Derek about what it really means to have boundaries, and why physical boundaries (e.g. putting microservices on different hosts) may not reduce your coupling or improve your scale.

[blog] The future of agentic development: Redefining the data practitioner lifecycle with Data Agent Kit. We showed this during my session at Google I/O, and it really is an impressive set of skills, tools, and plugins for doing legit work with data. Plug it into your favorite tool to create, query, and troubleshoot data solutions.

[blog] Agentic Design Patterns. Guillaume does a recap of a recent Devoxx talk, and includes his highly-visual and understandable slide deck about categories of agent patterns.

[blog] Introducing the pkg.go.dev API. Most other language ecosystems have discovery APIs for packages. Now Go

[article] How well do public benchmarks predict AI coding agent performance in production. I saw a lot of chatter on this topic over the past few days regarding Gemini 3.5 Flash. Benchmarks are useful, but eval based on your own scenarios.

[blog] Google Cloud Next 2026: The Agent Era and the Full AI Stack. James does a roundup of the highlights from the event, but with his analyst hat on to explain what matters.

[blog] Code was the smallest part of the job. I like “smallest” more than “easiest.” Coding isn’t “easy”; ask anyone who’s wrestled for hours with syntax or getting an outcome JUST right. But building good software systems is the big job.

[blog] What’s new in Flutter 3.44. You might have to block off your afternoon to read all this! But it’s impossible to even skim this and not be impressed by the breadth and momentum of Flutter.

[article] CIOs need a people strategy to scale AI. Nothing new, but still a good reminder about the hard work of change management.

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