Daily Reading List – September 14, 2026 (#866)

I’m in New York City for a day and had fun judging a hackathon conducted by Major League Baseball. AI helped all sorts of people build all sorts of things. In between all that, I walked seven miles around the city. Great start to the week!

[blog] The Feature Flag Graveyard: How a Safety Net Becomes Technical Debt. Good points here. All that flexibility you were adding to your system? Now you have toggle bloat. Give your feature flags an expiration date.

[article] The Interfaces Are Arriving. Specs like MCP and A2A have staying power, and teams need a plan for working with these protocols.

[blog] Confessions of an Unrepentant Slop Snob. Excellent post. Using AI for what should be personal communication is lazy and frankly, offensive. For functional output? Fire away.

[article] Why DBAs are right to be skeptical of AI — and where they’re wrong. Add structured skills to the mix, and use agents to address a shortage that isn’t going away.

[blog] Strong Opinions, Loosely Held. This is a useful type of audit for any of us to perform. What have we learned over the past years that upends previously-held opinions? Marty looks at ten of them regarding product management.

[article] Anthropic CEO outlines plan to slow AI development. Lots of chatter about this over the weekend. It’s fine if labs want to govern themselves, but I don’t see why governments needs to do it for them.

[blog] P(doom). Armin doesn’t buy into the above doomer hype. He believes regulation (even existing ones) should have played a part.

[blog] GitOps for AI Agents on Google Cloud: ArgoCD, Config Sync, and GKE. I haven’t come across much of anything regarding GitOps for agents. But it makes sense, especially when dealing with fleets of them.

[article] The Rise of the Forward Deployed Engineer — and How To Do the Job Right. Today’s FDEs don’t look like the original ones. Different work, in may places. Ideally, they act as an extension of your product/eng teams.

[blog] DevFest is back. The world’s largest community-led event is back. It’s more than 800 events in 115 countries. Find one near you.

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