Friday 1st August’s issue is presented by Augment Code | | | You ship to production. Vibes won't cut it. Get Augment Code, the AI assistant built for engineering teams working at scale. | | | | | | — James Stanier | | tl;dr: “I’m always trying to find new ways to use LLMs because it's both useful and a lot of fun. One of the unsurprising elements of being a CTO is that the buck stops with me when it comes to decisions about my engineering department, so I've been leaning more on LLMs to help me evolve my thinking, challenge my assumptions, and make better decisions. I thought I'd write up some of the ways that I've been doing that in the hope that it might help other engineering leaders to do the same.” | Leadership Management | | | — Mike Fisher | | tl;dr: “Build a challenge network. Think of it as the opposite of an echo chamber. Rather than surrounding ourselves with cheerleaders who validate our every move, we need thoughtful critics, people who care enough to push back. These are colleagues, mentors, or friends who are willing to question assumptions, highlight blind spots, and challenge us to do better. They aren’t adversaries; they’re intellectual allies who help us hold ourselves to higher standards.” | Leadership Management | | | — Molisha Shah | | tl;dr: How Drata's CTO rolled out AI coding assistants to 200+ engineers without compromising security or quality. Inside: their 7-vendor bake-off process, mandated daily usage pilots, and the OKRs that drove 5-10x speed-ups. Plus the evaluation checklist you can steal. | Promoted by Augment Code | Management Guide AI | | | — Osada Lakmal Paranaliyanage | | tl;dr: “Being lazy, when done right, is one of the most powerful tools in an engineer’s arsenal. It’s not about avoiding work—it’s about making smart decisions that reduce unnecessary effort in the long run. Whether it’s automating toil, optimizing costs, enabling teams to solve their own problems, or simplifying code for maintainability, the principle remains the same: invest effort upfront to save exponentially more later.” | CareerAdvice | “Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.” | | | | — Fred Brooks |
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| | — Nick Bergson-Shilcock | | tl;dr: “Our greatest asset is our community. With nearly 3,000 alums, we have easy and direct access to programmers of all stripes, with deep expertise and unique perspectives, from industry to academia. So we started this work by assembling an informal AI advisory group of alums who embody our most important educational values. We sought diversity among not only demographics, but also role type, industry, seniority, how recently they attended RC, and most importantly, their views on AI.” | ThoughtPiece AI | | | — Jeff Escalante | | tl;dr: Clerk supports building an MCP server directly into your Next.js app. This enables AI tools like Claude and Cursor to securely access user-authorized data. It’s a simple, standards-based setup that avoids extra infrastructure. | Promoted by Clerk | Tools AI NextJS | | | | tl;dr: “The 2025 Developer Survey is the definitive report on the state of software development. In its fifteenth year, Stack Overflow received over 49,000+ responses from 177 countries across 62 questions focused on 314 different technologies, including new focus on AI agent tools, LLMs and community platforms. This annual Developer Survey provides a crucial snapshot into the needs of the global developer community, focusing on the tools and technologies they use or want to learn more about.” | Survey | | | | tl;dr: “This post is written in a raw, unstructured, real-time format and celebrates small wins, honest mistakes, and the messy process of learning and building. It’s not the ultimate guide - just what worked for me, shared as-is. If you like seeing how things break and get fixed, you’re in the right place!” | Hardware | | | — Matheus Lima | | tl;dr: “Before we begin, let me be clear: yes, this is a subjective list. It’s not meant to end the debate — but to start it. These seven papers (sorted by date) stand out to me mostly because of their impact in today’s world. Honestly, each one deserves a blog post (or even a book!) of its own — but let’s keep it short for now. If your favorite doesn’t show up here, don’t worry, stick around for the bonus section at the end, where I’ll call out a few more that came this close to making the main list. So let’s dive in!” | Books | | Null Pointer | | Hand drawn by Manu | | Most Popular From Last Issue | Time Management - Mike Fisher | | Notable Links | Agents For Beginners: 11 Lessons to get started building AI agents | Any-Agent: Interface to evaluate different agent frameworks. | GitMCP: OS MCP server for GitHub projects. | Positron: NextGen Data Science IDE. | Undercover: Find missing tests. | |
| How did you like this issue of Pointer? 1 = Didn't enjoy it all // 5 = Really enjoyed it | | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
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