Daily Reading List – January 12, 2026 (#698)

I had some fun agentic coding sessions over the weekend as I wanted to test a couple of hypotheses about how the tools worked. I learned some things, and hope to publish some short blogs this week!

[blog] The Blood Dimmed Tide of Agents. More agents for coding, or business outcomes? Yay! How are we supposed to manage them all? *crickets*

[blog] Don’t fall into the anti-AI hype. Don’t listen to me; listen to great engineers who are doing better work, while staying eyes-wide-open about the possible implications. The fun of building is untouched, though. More from Simon.

[blog] Start your meetings at 5 minutes past. It’s the only system that works. My group does it too. If you want to avoid the back-to-back meeting mania, force them to start minutes later.

[blog] Under the Hood: Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). We announced this yesterday and it looks like it already has great industry backing. Browse and checkout via agents.

[blog] The AI platform shift and the opportunity ahead for retail. UCP was one of a few things we talked about at the National Retail Federation event.

[article] Google Cloud: A Deep Dive into GKE Sandbox for Agents. We want a safer way to run untrusted workloads. This subsystem is open source, and cleanly baked into our Kubernetes service.

[blog] AWS in 2026: The Year of Proving They Still Know How to Operate. Did our AWS friends figure some things out last year? Sure. Corey also points out that Google is their actual competition, not the revenue-obfuscating chaps in Redmond.

[blog] Joint statement from Google and Apple. Apple likes Gemini, and is betting on it for Siri and other experiences. News story here.

[blog] Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work. Very cool. This reminds me of some other things from us and others. Raw, but great potential.

[blog] Go 1.26 interactive tour. This release is a big one, and I enjoy Anton’s posts that let you interact with the new language features.

[blog] Increased file size limits and expanded inputs support in Gemini API. Reference cloud storage buckets and other sources when shipping context to Gemini.

[article] The biggest obstacle for engineer productivity in 2026. An AI agent can help you stay in the zone longer by keeping your from bouncing around different tools. But there’s also constant interruption as you wait for prompt results.

[blog] A2UI for Google Apps Script. This framework that lets agents generate dynamic UIs is pretty cool. Here, it’s implemented in a way that bakes into Google Workspace.

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