Category: Daily Reading List

I’m in New York and successfully navigated planes, trains, and walking 15 blocks. Lots of great AI content in my feed today, and I now gift that to you.

[blog] Advanced version of Gemini with Deep Think officially achieves gold-medal standard at the International Mathematical Olympiad. That’s pretty darn remarkable. And soon, it’ll be in the hands of Google customers.

[article] The Big LLM Architecture Comparison. Wow, fantastic post from Sebastian that shows us what’s new, relevant, and interesting with modern LLM architectures.

[blog] Adding Tools to Your AI Agent — The Scalable Way. In my own blog post from last week, I showed how to use the “API tool” in an agent. It’s a great approach.

[article] 5 key questions your developers should be asking about MCP. These are good questions to ask. Why use it? How do I secure it? What’s the long-term viability?

[blog] Exploring the context of online images with Backstory. Trustworthiness is hard to come by given all this AI-generated content. Maybe this will help.

[blog] Welcoming The Next Generation of Programmers. Great post. Don’t look down on vibe coders or those getting in the field. We’ve all started somewhere. Help them find a community so that they keep developing their engineering skills.

[docs] Generate videos with Veo 3. What a great example of useful docs. Samples are tight, parameters are defined, and examples abound. If you’re doing text (or image) to video prompting, you can learn from this.

[blog] Is AI Coming For Your Team Next? How AI Hype Is Becoming The Hot Layoff Excuse. For some teams and roles, I can understand pausing any new hiring until you see what the current team can do with AI assistance. I don’t yet see many cases where replacement makes sense.

[blog] Application monitoring in Google Cloud: Bridging manual and AI-assisted troubleshooting. New paradigms are on the way. It’ll be interesting to see how folks mix manual setup and intervention with AI-driven issue resolution.

[blog] Nobody Knows How To Build With AI Yet. Amusing and thought-provoking. I tell folks that the two main traits you need to exhibit nowadays are curiosity and humility. Don’t be over-confident, and just keep learning.

[blog] Mastering Agentic Development with Gemini and Roo Code. We’re all just trying new tools, and picking up new techniques constantly. Roo Code looks cool.

[article] Planning an Offsite for Your Leadership Team? Ask These 5 Questions. Are your leadership offsites kinda lame? It happens. I found these prompting questions interesting, and likely to stimulate the right type of chatter.

[article] AI Agents Are Creating a New Security Nightmare for Enterprises and Startups. New tech and patterns are often disruptive. Just be smart about your day-2 considerations.

[blog] Unlock Gemini’s reasoning: A step-by-step guide to logprobs on Vertex AI. Now you can retrieve some low-level details about probability choice of tokens returned by Gemini models.

Want to get this update sent to you every day? Subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email below:

I had a good day. Next week I’m in New York City for some customer meetings and offsites. Expect the same rhythm of reading lists because this is now a habit!

[blog] Vibe coding and the silent AI war inside tech companies. Good point here that the AI acceleration isn’t across all tasks. We’ll get some things done much faster, others, not so much.

[blog] BigQuery’s New Cost Controls Are Here to Help. “Unlimited” is a bad default quota amount for a billable service. JK points out some new BigQuery default quotas that’ll help you avoid runaway bills.

[blog] Giants awaken. Google Cloud GeminiCLI, AWS Kiro, developer experience and the need to ship and keep shipping. James at Redmonk looks at a couple of hyperscalers flexing their developer chops.

[blog] Back to The Future: Evaluating AI Agents on Predicting Future Events. There’s no existing data to train on for future events, so can you use AI to predict what’s going to happen?

[blog] MCP: Bringing mashups back! Love this. Agents and MCP make it simple to combine disparate APIs in new and funky ways.

[article] Open Source Is Too Important To Dilute. Dan says that true open source is worth defending, and we can’t water down the definition with these not-really-open definitions.

[blog] AI Agents, the New Frontier for LLMs. Folks on my team have been producing such exceptionally good content about AI. Not just the what, but the why and how.

[blog] Building an automated GitLab Merge Request Review Agent with Gemini CLI. Good example of a background task (CI pipeline) that can make use of an agentic tool.

[article] Anthropic tightens usage limits for Claude Code – without telling users. I feel for them. It’s hard to predict usage, it’s not cheap to serve, and competition is fierce.

[blog] Cloud CISO Perspectives: Our Big Sleep agent makes a big leap, and other AI news. AI is foiling attempts to exploit vulnerabilities. That’s wild. Also get a roundup of security links.

Want to get this update sent to you every day? Subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email below:

I bumped into some engineering folks at the office who are changing how they work with agentic CLIs. It was inspiring to see a real story about how our work is changing very dramatically.

[article] The Founder’s Guide to Building a V1 of Customer Success. Good advice here, whether you’re setting up such a team for the first time, or rebooting a stagnant team.

[blog] Proactiveness considered harmful? A guide to customise the Gemini CLI to suit your coding style. Fantastically good post, and an example of where open source is so powerful. Daniela wants to make the Gemini CLI less proactive, and explains how to steer and customize the model’s behavior.

[article] Leading After Your Predecessor Fails. Did you take a job where you replaced someone else? Did they bomb out? Here’s guidance for how to repair the damage.

[blog] Simplify your Agent “vibe building” flow with ADK and Gemini CLI. We’ll see more frameworks and products doing this, I’m certain. The ADK offers an llms-full.txt file that you can give your AI tool as context. This gives you the most relevant responses back.

[blog] Where Technology Executives Will Be Investing In 2026. Maybe no surprises here, but a reminder that the APAC market has the highest rate of IT spending growth coming up.

[blog] Five Big Improvements to Gradio MCP Servers. It seems that many people are using Gradio to expose MCP servers, and there are new improvements to auth along with other areas.

[blog] How Renault Group is using Google’s software-defined vehicle industry solution. Cars nowadays are basically computers with wheels. Software matters a lot, and here’s a story of how one giant manufacturer is building for the future.

[article] What can we learn from Meta’s code improvement practices? Short, but interesting look at research into how Meta scopes, prioritizes, and executes on code improvement projects.

[blog] Why the analyst advisor industry is getting obliterated by AI… and how to save it. Shots fired! Feels spot on, and frankly applies to anyone in a role of “thought leadership.” Step up your game.

[blog] Build with more flexibility: New open models arrive in the Vertex AI Model Garden. DeepSeek as a service joins models like Llama in our pay-as-you-go offering. Convenient when you don’t want to manage infra, or guess about capacity.

[blog] Vibe Coding Is the Future of Programming. Here’s How Your Company Can Get on Board. Bold title. I don’t think vibe coding as currently defined is the future. But, orchestrating AI tools is.

Want to get this update sent to you every day? Subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email below:

I planned my morning poorly with back-to-back intense presentations. I followed that up by staring into the middle distance for ten minutes to allow my brain to reboot. Do you give yourself a breather after some intense work, or do you push through?

[blog] Engineering Deutsche Telekom’s sovereign data platform. Cool story of getting the power of cloud, without compromising on compliance requirements.

[blog] Delegation is the AI Metric that Matters. Very interesting way to measure our acceptance of AI in our work and life.

[blog] How to Use Open Source Without Losing Your Code, Users – or Sanity. It’s easy to remain ignorant of the right ways to open source, and use open source. Let’s all get smarter so we don’t get burned.

[blog] Building production-ready generative AI: How Temporal supercharges Google’s Gemini and Veo. Long-running tasks are no joke. I like the way Temporal described the problem and solution here.

[blog] Proven Practices for Succeeding with a Multicloud Strategy. I’ll take “blog titles you’d never see from AWS in 2021” for $1000, Alex. But here we are. Solid advice.

[blog] 25 of my favorite ROI+ customer stories. I enjoy the quick demos I see from users on X, but these stories of actual generative AI success have more weight.

[article] 5 ways generative AI projects fail. It’s only fair to also share stories where the AI projects fail to land. Here are some situations to avoid.

[article] Bash 5.3 Has Some Big Improvements — Here’s How You Can Test It. If you could quickly recall the current version of Bash you’re using, then you’re a wizard. Bravo. I barely knew there was a current version. This ubiquitous Linux shell has some new features though.

[blog] Implementing High-Performance LLM Serving on GKE: An Inference Gateway Walkthrough. Lots of details in this post. Folks who use Kubernetes for LLM serving are going to like this.

[article] Why LLMs demand a new approach to authorization. Indeed. I need to learn more about what needed, and possible, in this space.

[article] AWS unveils Bedrock AgentCore, a new platform for building enterprise AI agents with open source frameworks and tools. You’ll see a lot of companies doing their best to own the agent control plane.

[blog] Why development leaders are investing in design. Good engineering only gets you so far. If you don’t have the right product sense and design focus, your products rarely expand beyond hardcore users.

Want to get this update sent to you every day? Subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email below:

A lot of AI stuff today. But also lots of insight about it, versus cheerleading. Dig in!

[blog] Context Engineering: Bringing Engineering Discipline to Prompts. This post gave me greater appreciation for what “context engineering” is about. Don’t assume it’s just a silly new term for something we were already doing.

[blog] AI from Google Cloud steps up to the plate at the MLB All-Star Game. The game’s tonight, and we’re adding a few cool experiences to the game.

[blog] Starter GEMINI.md file within a project directory for Gemini CLI. Pay attention to these posts that help us write effective agent instructions that improve the output of our tools.

[blog] The three great virtues of an AI-assisted programmer. What are you doing while waiting for your LLM to answer? How are you keeping control of the exercise? I liked Sean’s take here.

[article] The Pragmatic Engineer 2025 Survey: What’s in your tech stack? Surveys are surveys, but there’s data here that might validate (or invalidate) some of your assumptions about today’s developers.

[article] AI coding tools are shifting to a surprising place: the terminal. The survey above happened during April and May. I suspect the data would already look markedly different thanks to the rapid (and sustainable) rise in agentic terminal tools.

[blog] The Internal Platform Scorecard: Speed, Safety, Efficiency, and Scalability. I like the attributes along with corresponding KPIs and metrics that matter. Know how you’re measuring the success of your platform!

[blog] Gemini CLI Tutorial Series — Part 6 : More MCP Servers. Even more ways to use MCP servers in the Gemini CLI, including accessing Google Workspace and media services.

[blog] Next-Level Data Automation: Gemini CLI, Google Sheets, and MCP. Interacting with Google Sheets, Docs, and Slides from an agentic CLI opens up a ton of possibilities.

[blog] Tools: Code Is All You Need. A contrary opinion to the MCP hype. Maybe just use code instead?

[blog] The AWS Survival Guide for 2025: A Field Manual for the Brave and the Bankrupt. Amusing. You don’t have to put up with all this if you want a better cloud alternative.

[blog] AI Engineers and the Hot Vibe Code Summer. When I hear “AI engineer” I think of someone building AI models or doing ML work. Not a developer using AI tools. Kate looks at that term, and vibe coding to figure out what it all means.

[article] Global IT spend keeps growing despite trade war concerns. Spending still up for the year, but trimmed expectations. El Reg has a more pessimistic take on the same data.

[blog] The Fastest Way to Run the Gemini CLI: A Deep Dive into Package Managers. Super interesting content, especially if you care about performance.

Want to get this update sent to you every day? Subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email below:

I liked some of the advice and data in today’s reading list. Learn about taking care of yourself as a leader, generating media from agentic CLIs, embracing personal growth, and building better distributed systems.

[blog] The 2025 Docker State of Application Development Report. Tons of interesting data points in this survey. See what devs think of AI, remote dev environments, containers, and places to learn.

[article] Leading Is Emotionally Draining. Here’s How to Recover. I get that most individual contributors won’t spend a lot of time sympathizing with the challenges of leadership. But it’s no joke, and a heavy investment in leadership is more work that it appears.

[blog] Gemini CLI Tutorial Series — Part 5 : Github MCP Server. I go hot and cold on MCP. However, this is a good example of where it’s handy for agentic CLI work.

[blog] Give Gemini CLI the Ability to Generate Images and Video, Work with GitHub Repos, and Use Other Tools. Dammit, now I’m hot again on MCP. Here’s another scenario where an MCP brings functionality to the Gemini CLI that wouldn’t have otherwise been there.

[blog] How to Shift What You Think Is Possible. Growth looks different to beginners than experts. But both need a way to rethink what’s possible.

[blog] Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity. On Friday, I linked to a paper that showed a slowdown when devs used AI tools. Simon explores this further.

[blog] The GitOps Repository Structure: Monorepo vs. Polyrepo and Best Practices. Are you a monorepo person who likes everything in one place? Or is your source code and config data distributed across many repos? Here is advice for both.

[blog] Gemini Embedding now generally available in the Gemini API. Generate embeddings with this high performing and competitively priced model.

[blog] Distributed Systems Mistakes Nobody Warns You About: Consistency. Yes. It’s easy to assume that all the related operations succeeded, but you get into a funky state when you have a a bunch of async updates and one fails.

[blog] What You Actually Need to Monitor AI Systems in Production. Good topic, and not one I’ve seen widely discussed. What should you be keeping track of at each app stage?

[article] Building Autonomous Systems: A Guide to Agentic AI Workflows. This DigitalOcean article has a fairly rich look at the use cases, patterns, and technologies around agents.

[blog] How to Teach Gemini CLI to Write Python Scripts with Inline Dependencies. I think we’re selling ourselves short on our role with these AI tools. There are so many cases where our creativity is applied to “teach” these tools to do cool things.

Want to get this update sent to you every day? Subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email below:

Good end to the week. I appreciate having co-workers that I can just call up and strategize with. Or complain too. Or celebrate with. All at the same time.

[youtube-video] The Agent Factory – Episode 1: Agents, their frameworks and when to use them. This new podcast/video series has promise. It features some colleagues who did a good job looking at the overall landscape, and zeroing in on some Google innovations.

[article] Stop forcing AI tools on your engineers. Very good advice here. Definite give teams time to explore, give space, and know what matters. Also, don’t wait forever.

[blog] Beyond GROUP BY: Introducing advanced aggregation functions in BigQuery. This seems like a good deal for data folks. The post calls out some big performance and efficiency benefits of these new aggregation functions.

[blog] Our new approach to enterprise CI/CD: Free tier, source available, and guaranteed savings. There’s still interesting work happening in the CI/CD space. The Semaphore folks are making some moves.

[blog] User Count: One. Bespoke Software with Gemini CLI. You can just build software for yourself. Billy wanted help focusing, so built a Chrome extension for an audience of one.

[article] AI coding tools may not speed up every developer, study shows. I’m not just going to read (and share) posts that say everything is sunshine. We’re still all figuring out where these AI tools add value, and when other fundamentals need to be in place for them to be useful.

[article] Ollama or vLLM? How to choose the right LLM serving tool for your use case. “When to use what” is such an important question in so many areas nowadays. Here’s help with LLM serving tools.

[blog] Google Brings the Lustre Parallel File System to Its Cloud. Teams are trying to squeeze out every bit of performance on their ML jobs, and this should help them do that, with less management.

[blog] SQL reimagined: How pipe syntax is powering real-world use cases. You should give this a whirl. In reading the example queries, it does seem to have some real benefits over standard SQL.

[blog] Graph foundation models for relational data. This seems like some creative thinking around ML algorithms and training data.

[blog] How to use GenAI as an Executive Assistant. Lak wrote a series of seven posts (so far) about different roles that you can apply generative AI to. Check out his other posts about engineering, research, analyst, and more.

Want to get this update sent to you every day? Subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email below:

I’m officially having a hard time keeping up with this industry. My feed reader is constantly overflowing, the social feeds never stop, and vendors keep shipping interesting things. I’ll likely compensate by narrowing my attention a bit, but wow. So much happening.

[blog] Docker Brings Compose to the Agent Era: Building AI Agents is Now Easy. Very cool integrations for AI frameworks, and publishing Compose specs to Google Cloud Run in one command.

[blog] From localhost to launch: Simplify AI app deployment with Cloud Run and Docker Compose. Our deeper dive into Docker’s announcement.

[blog] How I use LLMs to learn new subjects. This seems like a reasonable way of looking at it. I liked the points about hallucinations.

[article] Survey Surfaces Significant Lack of Visibility Into Software Supply Chain Risks. It seems that a lot of folks don’t think they can see supply chain problems. Can you?

[docs] GraphRAG infrastructure for generative AI using Vertex AI and Spanner Graph. Here’s a terrific new guide for those doing a graph-based approach to retrieval augmented generation.

[article] How to Communicate with Your Team When Business Is Bad. We all react differently when a crisis hits. This post encourage a wise approach to handling this within your team.

[article] Shadow AI emerges in the enterprise. This is the least surprising headline of the year. 80% say employee AI tool adoption is outpacing the capacity for IT teams to vet the apps. And the other 20% are lying about it.

[article] How to Measure the ROI of AI Coding Assistants. Great asset here for team leaders that want to figure out what really matters in their dev experience.

[article] Introducing the AI Measurement Framework. Here’s more detail on the framework called out in the preceding article. Looks useful!

[blog] Cloud Storage bucket relocation: An industry first for non-disruptive bucket migrations. It’s not easy to move an object storage bucket to a different region. At least if you’re in any cloud besides Google’s.

[blog] Navigating the Mythical Sea of Sameness. I thought this was educational for those of us who communicate to others. Talking about differentiation can sometimes feel like bragging, but it’s important to help people understand what your company/product is uniquely doing.

[blog] What can agents actually do? Practical look at what AI agents are about, how to think about them, and what they’re capable of.

[blog] BigQuery meets ADK: 10 tips to safeguard your data (and wallet) from agents. We need more content about how to protect key assets in an environment with agents running loose.

[blog] A new era of Stack Overflow. I seem to recall a few of these resets from Stack Overflow lately, but I appreciate that they’re actively thinking about how to stay relevant to devs.

[article] Elon Musk’s xAI launches Grok 4 alongside a $300 monthly subscription. The bar keeps going up, and Grok 4 has some impressive performance. Some testing already from Simon.

Want to get this update sent to you every day? Subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email below:

When your day is typically full of meetings, does a light meeting day throw you off? It does for me, and I have to be very intentional about how I spend time. That was today, and I was able to get a few tasks done ahead of schedule.

[article] Hugging Face just launched a $299 robot that could disrupt the entire robotics industry. Looks great. Pre-order available now, not yet shipping or a ton of details.

[blog] Full-breadth Developers. Google is called out here as an anti-pattern, but I still really liked this post from Justin about bringing together the product (design) and execution skills into the developer role.

[blog] AI-Native Test Automation is Here. There’s been hand-wringing about AI slop resulting in more low-quality apps. But maybe, AI will help us add better testing than we have in the past?

[paper] Deep Research Agents: A Systematic Examination And Roadmap. You’ve got many choices when it comes to doing thorough research using an AI agent. This paper explores the core architectures and approaches of popular options.

[blog] Gen AI Evaluation Service — Computation-Based Metrics. What metrics should you use in your generative AI evals? Mete looks at computation-based metrics which are based on mathematics. He’s also got a great follow-on post that explains model-based metrics.

[blog] AI Tooling, Evolution and The Promiscuity of Modern Developers. Everything is up for grabs right now, as Stephen told me last week. He wrote a great piece today that you should read.

[article] Context Engineering: Going Beyond Prompt Engineering and RAG. If I’m the reason you keep seeing this term, my apologies. But I’m seeing it show up in many places.

[article] Spec-driven Development. Brian goes into depth on a topic I touched on last week. He does a terrific job explaining “agent docs” and doing explicit architecture and task management for the LLM.

[article] Against “Brain Damage.” This piece by Ethan reinforces why I’m gravitating to the spec-driven work that Brian highlighted above. It ensures that we’re still thinking, prioritizing, and steering creative work. And, not using AI as a crutch for everything, but still doing free thinking!

[article] Idle Thoughts On Programming and AI. A lot here, but it also builds on the last two items on the list. Software engineering feels like it’s changed more in the past 5 months than it has in the last 10 years.

[blog] Google Agent Development Kit (ADK): A hands-on tutorial. Terrific content here from Weights & Biases looking at building and evaluating AI agents.

[article] Tech unemployment rate hits lowest yet in 2025: CompTIA. Confusing, eh? With so much doom and gloom about layoffs and a bad tech market, it seems that open roles have simply shifted from big tech to many other places.

[youtube-video] Getting Started with Agent Development Kit Tools (MCP, Google Search, LangChain, etc.). This is a great conversation and I really like how Megan and Jack position the problem space and corresponding solutions.

[blog] Gemini CLI Tutorial Series — Part 4 : Built-in Tools. More tools discussion, this time looking at what’s included in the Gemini CLI. Part 3 looked at config settings.

[article] Why Senior Leaders Should Stop Having So Many One-on-Ones. Wow, this one made me stop and think. Should senior-level 1:1s be only focused on development, and leave comms and decisions only to group settings?

[blog] Unlock the Power of MCP Toolbox in Your Go Applications. Go developers can now use this SDK to access databases as tools within AI apps.

Want to get this update sent to you every day? Subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email below:

Today’s list had a good variety of contrarian takes. I’m unabashedly an AI optimist (even if that means Redditors think I’m an idiot), but I absorb a variety of points of view to try and stay grounded. And, I try to use most of the things I talk about in order avoid irrational optimism.

[blog] AI-Assisted Legacy Code Modernization: A Developer’s Guide. I’ve been studying this topic lately (how AI contributes to code modernization), and liked this post.

[blog] The Future of Engineering Leadership. Excellent advice. Becoming closer to the code, becoming more strategic, focusing on the business, and being an attentive leader are all important (required?) moving forward.

[blog] Announcing Vertex AI Agent Engine Memory Bank available for everyone in preview. Hey now, a fully managed memory service for your AI agents? This looks convenient to use, and works with multiple AI agent frameworks.

[article] Everyone in tech has an opinion about Soham Parekh. This was a wild story at the end of last week that had about a 36 hour news cycle.

[blog] Writing Code Was Never The Bottleneck. Code understanding is the hard part. Great take here.

[blog] Stop Building AI Agents. Now for some counter-programming to all the agent hype. Basically, don’t start with agents when simpler patterns are better.

[blog] Autonomous testing and the future of developer productivity. My friend Bryan just started at a very interesting company, and I’m glad to see him writing about topics like this.

[article] Technical debt is just an excuse. Spicy take! If you didn’t/don’t have explicit work planned to fix previous shortcuts, don’t call it “tech debt.” It’s just bad code from making bad decisions.

[blog] Taming agentic engineering – Prompts are code, .json/.md files are state. Fantastic piece that lays out a way of thinking about “programming” these LLMs and using state files to your advantage.

[article] Expectations for Agentic Coding Tools: Testing Gemini CLI. Speaking of agentic coding tools, The New Stack puts the Gemini CLI through the paces.

[article] Context Engineering Guide. Here’s an in-depth look at a concept that’s quickly growing in relevance. You might hate all these emerging terms, but look past that and study the ideas.

[blog] Improve your coding flow with Gemini Code Assist, Gemini CLI and Gitlab. Agents in the IDE are helpful, and adding MCP servers that talk to your source repo make them even more helpful.

[article] 30 Years of JavaScript: 10 Milestones That Changed the Web. Such an important technology. It was fun to see this look at how we got to where we are now.

Want to get this update sent to you every day? Subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email below: