Software Lead Weekly 
Issue #693, 6th March 2026
This Week's Favorite
The Self-Driving Codebase
8 minutes read.
Great content and even better presentation of how to rank the maturity of your adoption of Agentic Development. Where would you deploy it to change how the business delivers in noticeable ways - those that your customers will feel the transformation?
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
8 minutes read.
Great content and even better presentation of how to rank the maturity of your adoption of Agentic Development. Where would you deploy it to change how the business delivers in noticeable ways - those that your customers will feel the transformation?
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Culture
I Built a Claude Code Notification System That Uses Warcraft III Peon Voice Lines. It's Probably the Stupidest Thing I've Ever Shipped. And According to Everybody That Has Used It, It's Also Incredibly Useful. (Sound On)
1 minutes read.
My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
1 minutes read.
My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
The AI Vampire
11 minutes read.
Being in the same room with it (AI) creates excitement. The fact that people are getting tired of being overly excited isn't something we should paint in a negative light. Some of those people were not excited about their daily grind before. Do we think it's a better world? We have to start treating this industry like adults, rather than kids who get tired after eating too many candies and running in circles. I'm sharing this post because it's an important discussion. Maturity comes from understanding tradeoffs, both in how we build systems and how we have a team working together. This is why the word "Burnout" creates a vehicle for meaningless discussions - everyone can say everything without meaning anything, yet everyone nods. We're adults, working for an industry that pays extremely well, using our brains to create beauty in the world. We can control how we work and who we work for. We own our careers, and while it's challenging, there are many other professions where their day-to-day is much more stressful or difficult. So observe your mood, control your sleep, eat well, work with people you learn from and care about for a mission you believe is worthy in terms that your family will appreciate. Don't choose sides. There is none. Run the tradeoffs and observe. Iterate.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
11 minutes read.
Being in the same room with it (AI) creates excitement. The fact that people are getting tired of being overly excited isn't something we should paint in a negative light. Some of those people were not excited about their daily grind before. Do we think it's a better world? We have to start treating this industry like adults, rather than kids who get tired after eating too many candies and running in circles. I'm sharing this post because it's an important discussion. Maturity comes from understanding tradeoffs, both in how we build systems and how we have a team working together. This is why the word "Burnout" creates a vehicle for meaningless discussions - everyone can say everything without meaning anything, yet everyone nods. We're adults, working for an industry that pays extremely well, using our brains to create beauty in the world. We can control how we work and who we work for. We own our careers, and while it's challenging, there are many other professions where their day-to-day is much more stressful or difficult. So observe your mood, control your sleep, eat well, work with people you learn from and care about for a mission you believe is worthy in terms that your family will appreciate. Don't choose sides. There is none. Run the tradeoffs and observe. Iterate.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
When Building Costs Drop 90% but Distribution Costs Stay Flat, You Get a Gold Rush Where Everyone Digs and Nobody Sells.
3 minutes read.
Understanding the demand versus supply is important. Sure, we'll see much more software written and deployed. Building scalable software that serves millions of people will remain rare and hard to achieve, and, as before, writing the code won't be the bottleneck.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
3 minutes read.
Understanding the demand versus supply is important. Sure, we'll see much more software written and deployed. Building scalable software that serves millions of people will remain rare and hard to achieve, and, as before, writing the code won't be the bottleneck.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
"Automate the Entire Company"
4 minutes read.
The north star for having your entire operations run without you should be the target, much like SaaS companies continue to provide service (via APIs) 24-7. Nobody is surprised that Stripe works at 3 AM when most of Stripe's engineers are asleep; they expect that. We're not used to thinking of other functions the same way, but the distance isn't as big or new. The technology now makes it more believable (dare I say, desired).
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
4 minutes read.
The north star for having your entire operations run without you should be the target, much like SaaS companies continue to provide service (via APIs) 24-7. Nobody is surprised that Stripe works at 3 AM when most of Stripe's engineers are asleep; they expect that. We're not used to thinking of other functions the same way, but the distance isn't as big or new. The technology now makes it more believable (dare I say, desired).
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Peopleware
How I Became Good at Leading Incidents
5 minutes read.
Solving incidents teaches you about system design more than anything else you build. You learn where and how systems break, and how to recover during a meltdown. It influences the way you design new systems, ensuring that operating them is not an afterthought. You can experiment with such failures by conducting "Game Days" to see how people react to failures, then have a retrospective to learn as a team about your blind spots, missing tools, and missing (documented) knowledge.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
5 minutes read.
Solving incidents teaches you about system design more than anything else you build. You learn where and how systems break, and how to recover during a meltdown. It influences the way you design new systems, ensuring that operating them is not an afterthought. You can experiment with such failures by conducting "Game Days" to see how people react to failures, then have a retrospective to learn as a team about your blind spots, missing tools, and missing (documented) knowledge.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Build, Don’t Stack
5 minutes read.
If you're running systems in production at scale, you learn the beauty of the idempotent trait, even if it's not the mathematical version: "safe to run repeatedly; the outcome stabilizes after the first run." -- you learn to understand where you need to keep state (and how to deal with stale or corrupted state), how to understand the health of the system (without DoS-ing yourself during recovery), how to shift the system to a desired state in steps, etc.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
5 minutes read.
If you're running systems in production at scale, you learn the beauty of the idempotent trait, even if it's not the mathematical version: "safe to run repeatedly; the outcome stabilizes after the first run." -- you learn to understand where you need to keep state (and how to deal with stale or corrupted state), how to understand the health of the system (without DoS-ing yourself during recovery), how to shift the system to a desired state in steps, etc.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Inspiring Tweets
- Oren
P.S. Can you share this email? I'd love for more people to experiment and improve their company's culture.
P.S. Can you share this email? I'd love for more people to experiment and improve their company's culture.