I enjoyed the time off, and am also happy to be back into routines. The tech world didn’t take much of a break, and I’m working through a reading backlog.
[blog] Most rewrites serve the engineer, not the business. Spicy headline, reasonable take. And using AI doesn’t help you understand the “why” of the decisions embedded within the existing system.
[blog] Where does Antigravity look for Agent Skills? We’ve made this confusing and I look forward to the point when agent skills can be easily discovered and stashed for later use. Mete does a good job here steering us to to the right places.
[article] 5 Traits That Set the Best Leaders Apart. Terrific advice. Some of these traits are easier to adopt than others.
[blog] How to Count Gemini Tokens Locally. As we all become more token conscious, it’s not a bad idea to understand the ins-and-outs of counting tokens.
[article] New Alibaba AI framework skips loading every tool, cutting agent token use 99%. We’re going to need to see more of this in all the AI frameworks. Instead of upfront loading of every tool (and all that context), we should have a lazy loading process.
[blog] What’s New in A2A: v1.0, a Python DX Glow-Up, and a Fresh New Look. A2A has staying power. You’re seeing it supported across programming languages and commercial products. This was a pretty major 1.0 release.
[blog] The State of AI in the SDLC: A Roadmap for Scaling. I buy it. As you chase your first customer, you’re just focused on the code (and use case). Then you have to think about process, and after that, organization.
[article] 10 moments that defined AI’s turbulent first half of 2026. Nobody would have guessed all of these back at the start of the year.
[blog] Of Skills and Loops with AI Assistance. If you invest up front in encoding your knowledge into skills and crafting agent loops, you’ll see some fairly dramatic speedups.
[blog] Building Gin: Simple Over Easy. Sometimes the throwaway thing you built along the way turns into the main thing. Great story about the start of Go’s most popular web framework.
[blog] Tom’s opinionated guide to skill building 101. Excellent. Skills don’t just serve software developers. They can make other disciplines, like technical writing, significantly better.
[article] The twilight of the chatbots. Looping agents with good direction don’t require a lot of human intervention. That’s different than early mainstream AI days where we engaged with chatbot interfaces.
[blog] Anomaly detection using dynamic thresholds and two-year-long alerts in Cloud Monitoring. Sometimes static thresholds or short lookback windows don’t give you the right signals. We’ve now made it easier to create alert policies over wide sets of historical metrics.
[article] The Pulse: a new trend, smart model routing. Yes, take advantage of tools that can pick the right model for the task. This can save you a ton of money.
[article] The website of the future may assemble itself for every visitor. I suspect that this generative UI pattern is going to show up in a LOT of web and mobile experiences in short order.
Want to get this update sent to you every day? Subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email below:
Richard Seroter's Architecture Musings 
Leave a comment