Daily Reading List – July 2, 2026 (#817)

I had a great day off. The kids had a summer camp for the morning, so I took a joyful, meandering drive through the mountains and towards the beach. One beach-adjacent taco stand later, I wandered back. This is why I’ll never want a self-driving car.

[article] 7 reasons experienced EMs get stuck. This may be for engineering managers, but these reasons apply to nearly any manager position.

[blog] A return to two-pizza culture. Amazon’s Werner Vogels looks at the shift in when you write down your plan, and how teams work with AI.

[blog] Learning faster with Antigravity. How do you build a frontend for a backend you’re unfamiliar with? Andrew did a learning loop, and created a skill to make this process repeatable.

[article] Z.ai launches ZCode to challenge Cursor, Claude Code and GitHub Copilot in AI coding. The hottest AI coding model just got a coding UX. Smart fast-following offering.

[blog] Bringing speed and strong cost performance to the market with Gemini Omni Flash and Nano Banana 2 Lite. Speaking of cool models, these two are remarkable for those doing media creation.

[blog] Guide to the OWASP MCP Top 10. Here are the security issues you need to watch out for with MCP. Some of these you can directly mitigate, and others might require some proxies or gateways to protect your users.

[blog] AlloyDB AI Functions – now with revolutionary performance boosts and cost savings. We’ve made it cheaper and faster to make LLM calls directly from your SQL statements.

[blog] 🤖 Ten do’s and don’ts for LinkedIn posts, according to actual research, based on pre-slop posts. Solid AI-summary from Coté here. Do these things to perform better on LinkedIn and stop hating yourself.

[blog] Why we built ADK 2.0. A big part of this was bringing deterministic execution to agents with “workflows.” Good post on when to use this new abstraction.

[article] When Developing an AI Strategy, Beware the Urgency Trap. Purpose matters more than anything else. Get that right! Rushing headlong in the wrong direction rarely pays off.

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