Reading diary

What I read, and what stayed with me.

A running log of articles, papers, and books, with the notes I kept. 277 entries and counting. Highlights are the article's words; notes are mine.

Jump toBrowse 2026

November 2026

2 notes

October 2026

5 notes

Monday

October 26

Revised rules of engineering leadership.

  • The good news is that this means the things that were most valuable to speed up engineering two years ago are still the things that are most valuable to speed them up today.
  • Of course, the harness will miss things, but so will human reviewers, and most areas are relatively safe to make changes. Of course, there are some higher risk areas, where this doesn’t hold true. By effectively capturing these distinctions properly, we can go much faster without introducing risk.
  • High judgment individuals can wander across a company doing remarkable things, but at some point they do get hemmed in by lack of domain context, which is why durable teams are the fundamental building block, even in this era.
  • Your team and company can only benefit from this increased pace of execution if you can make durable decisions quickly, and those decisions are good. This is the primary reason, in my opinion, why the average CTO role has necessarily become substantially more technical and less bureaucratic than a year ago
  • Pretty much every PR is written by harnesses now, at least in the first pass

Quantos impostos cabem num país? França é recordista, Portugal está acima da média europeia by The DuckDB team

September 2026

1 note

August 2026

5 notes

July 2026

14 notes

Friday

July 17

A Complete Guide To AGENTS.md by Matt Pocock

  • Notice the light touch, no “always,” no all-caps forcing. Just a conversational reference.

Announcing Bonsai 27B: The First 27B-Class Model to Run on a Phone by PrismML

DuckDB Extensions: The Past, the Present, and the Future by DuckDB

Can We Agree on a Storage/Workload Architecture Taxonomy? — Jack Vanlightly

  • OLTP such as the RDBMS like Postgres and MySQL use row-based storage engines. OLAP, such as Clickhouse, cloud data warehouse and the lakehouse use column-based storage.
  • HTAP is a hybrid workload system: one system -> both transactional and analytical workloads. The HTAP system therefore has specialized storage and specialized query engine to stitch together the row-based and columnar data.

DuckCon #7 – ggsql: A grammar of graphics for SQL (Teun van den Brand)

A return to two-pizza culture by

  • Within a week, Swami Sivasubramanian, our VP of Agentic AI, saw the prototype and gave the team his full support. Three engineers joined. By the second week, they had a software development manager and a few more engineers, reaching a roughly even split between science and engineering. They were deliberate about not scaling too fast. Each person who was brought on was selected because they had a specific skill, and they had to adapt to a culture that was a complete departure from how the broader organization operated. They were expected to own a problem and deliver with autonomy, and ownership meant the same thing it has always meant at Amazon: you build it, you own it.
  • Writing is still as important as ever, and it should be you doing the writing, not your AI. Writing forces you to think clearly and confront gaps in your logic.

The Coming Loop by Armin Ronacher

  • Obviously that is powerful and I cannot deny that it sounds appealing. But giving in to that idea, particularly with less and less human oversight means accepting that we may no longer understand the whole system in the same way. We treat it, we monitor it, we stabilize it, but we do not necessarily comprehend it.

New DuckDB-Iceberg Features in v1.5.3 by Tom Ebergen, Thijs Bruineman

Test-Driving the Lance Lakehouse Format in DuckDB by LanceDB team and Guillermo Sanchez

PostgreSQL 19 New Features by Neon

Tuesday

July 14

Introducing Durable Functions in PostgreSQL by abeomor-msft

Loop Engineering by Addy Osmani

  • Your understanding still rots if you allow it. The faster the loop ships code you did not write, the bigger the gap between what exists and what you actually get. That’s comprehension debt and a smooth loop just makes it grow faster unless you read what the loop made.
  • And the comfortable posture is the dangerous one. When the loop runs itself its very tempting to stop having an opinion and just take whatever it gives back. I called that cognitive surrender.

June 2026

8 notes

Thursday

June 11

Coding Is No Longer the Constraint: Scaling Developer Experience to Teams and Agents at Spotify by Spotify Engineering

  • The flip side: we now have 76% more PRs to review. We’re learning where to apply human judgment — auto-merging what’s safe, focusing review where it matters most — and rethinking how we plan and prioritize as the bottleneck moves from coding to decision-making.

The Interface Is No Longer the Product by Alejandro Gonzalez

  • The first wave of AI products is about access: can the agent use the tools we already use? The next wave is about representation: is the tool itself built around a source of truth an agent can safely inspect, modify, and reason about?

Wednesday

June 10

Python 3.15: features that didn’t make the headlines

Owning Code in the Age of AI by Alejandro Gonzalez

  • When an engineer prompts a model, reviews the result for a few minutes, and merges it, they are no longer acting as the author of the code. They are acting as something closer to a reviewer, architect, and integrator.
  • And one natural reaction is to say: fine, we will rely more on tests. But AI writes tests too. If the same system generates both the implementation and the tests, those tests may only validate the model’s own assumptions. They become another generated artifact, not necessarily an independent safety net
  • Reliability is not achieved through perfect code. It is achieved through systems that tolerate imperfect code.
  • The best engineers probably won’t be the fastest coders. They’ll be the people who design systems that remain safe even when the code inside them is imperfect. That future looks a lot like SRE. Not because engineers stopped caring about quality, but because the only way to manage infinite code is to build systems that can survive it.

Tuesday

June 9

bliki: Agentic Programming

  • I like to distinguish agentic programming from Vibe Coding. With vibe coding humans don’t look at the code, indeed they forget that it even exists, while with agentic programming they are concerned with the code, often giving it detailed review. Agentic programming is also distinct from using LLMs as a sophisticated code completion mechanism, where LLMs participate in writing code inside an IDE environment.
  • This shift in the nature of programming raises extensive questions about what kinds of activities programmers need in the future and what skills we require. At this point harness engineering, focusing on working on the guides and sensors around the LLM seem central. Additionally this raises the importance of programmers understanding the domain they are working with, collaborating with users and customers to iteratively define and build their product.

Quack: The DuckDB Client-Server Protocol by The DuckDB team

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