Daily Reading List – January 21, 2026 (#704)

It’s been a fourteen meeting day (with one more this evening) so my battery is drained. On the plus side, lots of great things going on around here.

[article] The Palantirization of everything. Many companies are enamored with high-touch, forward-deployed engineers. But is that a playbook others can copy?

[blog] Architecture for Disposable Systems. I like the thought exercise behind this idea. What if that app doesn’t need careful engineering?

[blog] Code Is Cheap Now. Software Isn’t. No barrier to entry, and virtually no cost to produce code. But software is still expensive, and doing it with taste and timing will remain a differentiator.

[article] How Google’s ‘internal RL’ could unlock long-horizon AI agents. This space is so far from “done.” Don’t assume that any shortcoming of the current approach is going to stay that way!

[blog] A Software Library with No Code. I screwed around with this idea a couple of years ago and Drew does a more sophisticated take with today’s more powerful tools.

[blog] Welcome to MCP-P-A-looza. You can use MCP from basically any language. Heck, even Haskell. William gathers a lot of the work in one place.

[article] Why Everyone Should Still Use an RSS Reader in 2026. Still my most relied upon learning tool. Without Feedly, I’d be stuck.

[blog] Agent Psychosis: Are We Going Insane? Armin wonders if we’re losing the plot, getting addicted to prompts, or need better tools as we figure out the new norms of software engineering.

[article] AI coding requires developers to become better managers. Good take from Matt on specs and planning. It’s time to grow those skills around slowing down, exploring problem spaces, and capturing the right intent.

[blog] Sawasdee Thailand! Google Cloud launches new region in Bangkok. Hmm, I may need to find an excuse to go visit this year.

[blog] A Brief History of Ralph. A few months ago, “Ralph Wiggum” was just a sweet idiot kid from The Simpsons. Now? It’s a hot AI engineering approach.

[blog] AI Agent Engineering in Go with the Google ADK. My product area is actively working to make Go the best language for devs building AI apps. See here how to build out some AI agents in Go.

[article] ServiceNow positions itself as the control layer for enterprise AI execution. None of the big enterprise SaaS vendors wants to be reduced to an API used by an agent. Expect more pushes like this one.

[blog] Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills. If you want to be great at software in 2026, focus your skills training on communication.

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