Daily Reading List – April 27, 2026 (#771)

I’m on vacation this week, hoping to recharge after last week’s shenanigans. But that also means more time for reading. So besides spending today at the San Diego Zoo, I read enough to publish a reading list.

[blog] From “Hello World” to “Hello Agents”: The Developer Keynote That Rewired Software Engineering. This is quite the writeup from last week’s developer keynote at Google Cloud Next.

[article] Google Cloud Next 2026: Pichai and Kurian on Why Cloud Is Now an Operating System, Not a Service. The recaps keep coming, and this one makes some astute observations about the competitive landscape.

[article] The 20 Software Engineering Laws. I read this over the weekend, but it’s worth including in today’s list. Great look at familiar (and unfamiliar?) principles that might shape how you approach engineering work.

[blog] Stitch’s DESIGN.md format is now open-source so you can use it across platforms. Don’t sleep on this. Design tools might get the interop spec they need.

[blog] ReasoningBank: Enabling agents to learn from experience. Unlike other approaches, this strategy analyzes and uses successful and failed experiences to improve agents after deployment.

[blog] Roadmaps: Preparing To Self-Destruct In Three, Two, One … The era of intense annual planning and rigorously maintained roadmaps is on pause. Maybe dead. Unless you’re doing physical construction, you should be focusing on shorter time horizons and continuous planning.

[article] Google CEO Sundar Pichai says 75% of the company’s code is AI-generated. Hey, it’s me (and my buddy Sundar) quoted in this Fast Company article.

[blog] A good AGENTS.md is a model upgrade. A bad one is worse than no docs at all. Very actionable advice here on how to help (or hurt!) your agent trajectories with these documents.

[blog] All your agents are going async. This is focused on human-agent patterns (like with your coding tool). But those building agentic systems are already working through async patterns for triggering, state management, and gathering responses.

[blog] This Is How To Improve Your Writing: 6 Expert Insights. Every single one of these insights is spot on. So many great thoughts go unseen because the thinker can’t communicate them effectively.

[blog] AI threats in the wild: The current state of prompt injections on the web. What are indirect prompt injection patterns, and what do they look like in the wild? Our Google Security team does a sweep.

[article] AWS Ends WorkMail and Moves App Runner to Maintenance Mode. For some reason, no other cloud besides Google Cloud can get traction with app container runtimes. So strange.

[blog] Next ’26 Hands-On: 10 Codelabs to Build Featured Tech. We added well over a hundred new codelabs to our catalog last week to help devs go hands-on with all the tech they saw at Cloud Next. Here are some highlights.

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