Software Lead Weekly
Issue #694, 13th March 2026
This Week's Favorite
2026 Staff Engineers Need to Get Hands-on Again
4 minutes read.
"Yes, you still need to scale the engineers around you, but they might be scaling you. Everybody is figuring out how to use these new tools and if you don’t figure it out, suddenly you’ll be recommending poor decisions to your org because you don’t understand how the world has changed." -- I love this take by Paula Muldoon on the changes Staff+ engineers need to consider in their day-to-day work.
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4 minutes read.
"Yes, you still need to scale the engineers around you, but they might be scaling you. Everybody is figuring out how to use these new tools and if you don’t figure it out, suddenly you’ll be recommending poor decisions to your org because you don’t understand how the world has changed." -- I love this take by Paula Muldoon on the changes Staff+ engineers need to consider in their day-to-day work.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Culture
When the Whole Team Is on Claude Code
1 minutes read.
My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile.
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1 minutes read.
My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile.
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Share it via Twitter or email.
Productivity and Entropy
7 minutes read.
As we adopt agentic development, understanding how to document and reason about the requirements and constraints will become critical, as Subbu Allamaraju puts it: "As more changes get made, the coupling within the system changes in unexplainable ways. The result is increased entropy. Changes become time-consuming to make and difficult to validate. AI will likely add more fuel to this situation unless we find ways to coerce everyone to use the same model of how the system is supposed to work. It will be difficult to construct such unified models for large monoliths, or even for monorepos. [...] AI will require us to hold on to good software engineering principles even tighter. Those who understand this will build systems that grow and last. The ones chasing unbounded productivity gains won’t know why they failed."
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
7 minutes read.
As we adopt agentic development, understanding how to document and reason about the requirements and constraints will become critical, as Subbu Allamaraju puts it: "As more changes get made, the coupling within the system changes in unexplainable ways. The result is increased entropy. Changes become time-consuming to make and difficult to validate. AI will likely add more fuel to this situation unless we find ways to coerce everyone to use the same model of how the system is supposed to work. It will be difficult to construct such unified models for large monoliths, or even for monorepos. [...] AI will require us to hold on to good software engineering principles even tighter. Those who understand this will build systems that grow and last. The ones chasing unbounded productivity gains won’t know why they failed."
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
How Coding Agents Are Reshaping Engineering, Product and Design
7 minutes read.
"This doesn’t mean there is no room for specialization. A very senior engineer who just thinks about the system architecture is still valuable. As is a PM who hasn’t picked up vibe coding but does have a super clear mental model of the customers problems and what to build. Same with a designer who can understand and mock user journeys and interactions, even if still in Figma. But the bar for specialization is much higher. You have to be not only fantastic at your domain, but also incredibly fast at review and an incredible communicator. And there probably aren’t that many of these roles at any given company." -- This is true for senior folks but also for junior ones. Understanding your (new) unfair advantage is the name of the game.
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7 minutes read.
"This doesn’t mean there is no room for specialization. A very senior engineer who just thinks about the system architecture is still valuable. As is a PM who hasn’t picked up vibe coding but does have a super clear mental model of the customers problems and what to build. Same with a designer who can understand and mock user journeys and interactions, even if still in Figma. But the bar for specialization is much higher. You have to be not only fantastic at your domain, but also incredibly fast at review and an incredible communicator. And there probably aren’t that many of these roles at any given company." -- This is true for senior folks but also for junior ones. Understanding your (new) unfair advantage is the name of the game.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
You've Been Kicked Out of the Arena, You Just Don't Know It Yet
5 minutes read.
Learning doesn't stop at school (or university). Those who appreciate it and know how to push themselves and learn on their own will thrive in today's environment. Those who wait for the company to guide them, wait for approvals for what to do, or wait for things to stabilize first. Those will be left out of the game.
Read it later via Instapaper.
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5 minutes read.
Learning doesn't stop at school (or university). Those who appreciate it and know how to push themselves and learn on their own will thrive in today's environment. Those who wait for the company to guide them, wait for approvals for what to do, or wait for things to stabilize first. Those will be left out of the game.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Peopleware
Why the Single Responsibility Principle Protects Working Memory
6 minutes read.
Understanding Systemic Entropy and how to architect systems will become more important as the ease of writing code increases, without ensuring that the code meets the standards you want. Read "Class Level: Objects" and "Method Level: Units of Thought" slowly. Observe the code you've produced in the past month and see if you were able to add clarity and readability to it. It will matter when you need to debug things during an incident or review a complex change.
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6 minutes read.
Understanding Systemic Entropy and how to architect systems will become more important as the ease of writing code increases, without ensuring that the code meets the standards you want. Read "Class Level: Objects" and "Method Level: Units of Thought" slowly. Observe the code you've produced in the past month and see if you were able to add clarity and readability to it. It will matter when you need to debug things during an incident or review a complex change.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Great Slide From a Deck on How to Name Your Company. But I Think It Applies to Almost Anything Creative.
3 minutes read.
Naming is always fun (maybe why I have 30 domains) and very often important (if your product becomes popular). This balance between familiarity and distinctiveness is helpful. Maybe I should have picked a different name for Software Lead Weekly 13 years ago?
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3 minutes read.
Naming is always fun (maybe why I have 30 domains) and very often important (if your product becomes popular). This balance between familiarity and distinctiveness is helpful. Maybe I should have picked a different name for Software Lead Weekly 13 years ago?
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Inspiring Tweets
@rabois: People who advice founders that startups are marathons not sprints have never looked up what a solid marathoner runs per mile on average
@naval: The human brain isn’t designed to process all of the world’s breaking emergencies in realtime.
- 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.