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We have a bunch of articles this week, a lot around AI, design, some drama at Meta (as usual) and leadership. Check it out
Audit your Agent files
When did you last delete a rule from your CLAUDE.md? Everyone keeps adding to these files, and nobody takes anything out.
And do the skills you wrote for yourself beat the generic ones the community shares?
Addy has a routine for keeping agent files lean, and a command that does most of the work. Check it out.
Season 2 rewind
One more week without a new episode, because Season 3 premieres on September 7th. So here is the end of the Season 2 rewind:
François Best on nuqs and keeping React state in the URL without hitting the browser's rate limits on the History API. YouTube / Spotify
Maxim Salnikov on the two new job titles showing up inside dev teams, context engineers and agent ops. YouTube / Spotify
Marko Gaćeša on agent-native CI/CD and whether an agent should be allowed to trigger a deployment. YouTube / Spotify
Carmen Huidobro on why versatility beats both generalism and specialization, after 17 years of freelancing across every stack. YouTube / Spotify
Craig Abbott on accessibility at scale, and the 95.8% of the top million sites that fail automated checks. YouTube / Spotify
Season 3 starts September 7th. Support the podcast by subscribing to the platform of your choice! Or both, please do both ❤️
Community reads
AI and agents
AI Coding will Prevent Expertise by Lars Faye — if the tools demand expertise to use well, and they remove the friction that builds expertise, where does the next expert come from?
AI engineering for critical systems by Dan Anthony — inside the team that moves $5 trillion in payments a day, about the engineer who has to debug a system at 3am after a year of not writing the code.
The AI-Native SDLC Playbook by Louis Claxton — Anthropic's take on what the lifecycle looks like once code stops being the bottleneck and but the revewing is.
Five Guardrails by Ian Johnson — five worked examples of agent guardrails.
The next generation of MCP by Matt Carey — MCP goes stateless, so a server can run on a Worker with no session to keep alive.
A Deep Dive into Grok Bot by Flavio Copes — xAI's version of an agent that keeps working after you close the laptop.
What Changed in Kimi K3 to make it so good? by adlrocha — it reaches a million-token context at a fraction of the cost, adlrocha explains how.
Engineering leadership
How I Find Problems to Solve as a Staff Engineer by Lalit Maganti — where do the problems worth a staff engineer's time come from?
You should never be angry at work by Sean Goedecke — the angry engineer is often the one who cares the most, and still ends up left out of the room.
A Fresh Definition of The Product Role by Marty Cagan — if AI makes building cheap, what is left for a product manager to do?
Shit on fire yo
The Pulse: Meta's self-inflicted resignation-wave by Gergely Orosz — Meta is paying $400K to $1M+ retainers to engineers it never laid off, who then leave anyway. Drama alert.
Infrastructure and performance
Git at any scale by Vicent Martí — Cursor rebuilt Git hosting on write-ahead logs in S3, and it can do 300 pushes a second.
How an Underrated Refactor Saved 90% Memory Usage by Kevin Van Cott — one refactor took TanStack Table from 1.5 million rows to 16 million.
Book recommendation
Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr
Colin Bryar spent two years as Jeff Bezos's shadow, sitting in every meeting as his chief of staff, and Bill Carr was the VP who launched Prime Video and Amazon Music. Between them they explore over 27 years at Amazong and go deep into the processes and ceremonies that make it work and where they fail.
Meme of the week
Conferences
ZurichJS
ZurichJS is in 10 days. DONT MISS IT!
Use code REACTJSBARCELONA_10 for 10% off tickets.
CityJS Athens
CityJS lands in Athens this October.
My link takes 10% off the ticket price for you.
React Day Berlin
React Day Berlin takes over Kosmos on December 4.
Register through my badge and the remote ticket is free, which normally costs €90 at the early bird rate. You get the HD stream and the free remote workshops, and the recordings afterwards.
Register with my badge and watch for free
That's it for this one.
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