Daily Reading List – January 14, 2026 (#700)

I talked too much today. Did a podcast episode with someone and was a guest at a fireside chat in our San Diego office. I try to listen more than I talk in 1:1s, so that balanced things out today a bit.

[blog] Common misunderstandings about large software companies. Sheesh, this feels spot on. Criticisms about larger companies are often missing perspective.

[blog] Tutorial : Getting Started with Google Antigravity Skills. Absolutely fantastic look at the new Skills capability in Google Antigravity. And importantly, how it fits with all the other ways to customize AI dev workflows.

[article] Shopify, Walmart Endorse Google’s New Open Commerce Protocol. This one might have legs. It’s not locked into one ecosystem and opens up a few interesting use cases.

[article] Five LLM Content Strategies Revealed from Top Dev Tool Companies. Does your company make it easy for LLMs to understand your product and how to use it? Adam has a great post about how companies are using llms.txt Markdown files to steer the LLM.

[blog] Your AI coding agents need a manager. You’ll see so much of this in 2026. We’re entering the phase of multiple agents working for you. Learn good communication skills, prioritization skills, and stay smart on the underlying tech.

[article] AI is rendering some IT skill sets obsolete. Some tech skills from 2010 are obsolete. Few things stay entirely static! But the pace may be accelerating for some skills that weren’t obviously open to replacement.

[blog] Introducing Community Benchmarks on Kaggle. Community-generated custom evals that provide insights into real model behavior? I like it.

[article] Hasta la vista! Microsoft finally ends extended updates for ancient Windows version. I know that someone reading this has Windows Server 2008 sitting on a server somewhere. You knew this day was coming.

[blog] Bring back opinionated architecture. Be informed, and then make some calls. Stop saying “it depends” in your architecture.

[blog] The Tool Bloat Epidemic. This post has a handful of solid suggestions for avoiding MCP tool bloat that eats your tokens and contributes to context rot.

[blog] This Week in Open Source for January 9, 2026. Good roundup of upcoming events and happenings worth paying attention to.

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