Software Lead Weekly 
Issue #720, 11th September 2026
This Week's Favorite
A Project of One's Own
8 minutes read.
You know you've found your purpose when you can understand and relate to this one: "In Andy Hertzfeld's book on the Macintosh, he describes how they'd come back into the office after dinner and work late into the night. People who've never experienced the thrill of working on a project they're excited about can't distinguish this kind of working long hours from the kind that happens in sweatshops and boiler rooms, but they're at opposite ends of the spectrum. That's why it's a mistake to insist dogmatically on work/life balance. Indeed, the mere expression work/life embodies a mistake: it assumes work and life are distinct."
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8 minutes read.
You know you've found your purpose when you can understand and relate to this one: "In Andy Hertzfeld's book on the Macintosh, he describes how they'd come back into the office after dinner and work late into the night. People who've never experienced the thrill of working on a project they're excited about can't distinguish this kind of working long hours from the kind that happens in sweatshops and boiler rooms, but they're at opposite ends of the spectrum. That's why it's a mistake to insist dogmatically on work/life balance. Indeed, the mere expression work/life embodies a mistake: it assumes work and life are distinct."
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Culture
When the All 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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The Revolt of the Reader
5 minutes read.
This should be on your office wall and shared as a reminder with your team: "We readers shouldn’t be expected to labor to understand a sentence that the writer themselves didn’t work to create." Please take Bryan Cantrill's advice very seriously. Your credibility is on the line.
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5 minutes read.
This should be on your office wall and shared as a reminder with your team: "We readers shouldn’t be expected to labor to understand a sentence that the writer themselves didn’t work to create." Please take Bryan Cantrill's advice very seriously. Your credibility is on the line.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Kiro's Principles for Frontier Engineering
8 minutes read.
If you had to prepare something similar to what Kiro's dev team built and published here, what 10 principles would you set? Maybe this post will inspire you to try it out.
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8 minutes read.
If you had to prepare something similar to what Kiro's dev team built and published here, what 10 principles would you set? Maybe this post will inspire you to try it out.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Humans Are Always the Bottleneck
7 minutes read.
How much of your own review time goes to things a well-scoped process could route around you entirely? Shifting more of our time to planning (including technical discovery and POCs) and verification will become a critical skill to master. DongYun Kang shares how he's building agentic development processes and iterating over time as he gains new insights (e.g. AI review quality as a function of context size)
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7 minutes read.
How much of your own review time goes to things a well-scoped process could route around you entirely? Shifting more of our time to planning (including technical discovery and POCs) and verification will become a critical skill to master. DongYun Kang shares how he's building agentic development processes and iterating over time as he gains new insights (e.g. AI review quality as a function of context size)
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Peopleware
Loop Engineering From First Principles — Kyle Mistele (Video)
18 minutes read.
Kyle Mistele reframes agentic loops through control theory: a sensor measuring current state, a setpoint for the desired state, a controller computing an incremental change, an actuator applying it. This was helpful for me to think about it like vertical slices, where you try to provide small incremental value to the user rather than aiming for one big change.
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18 minutes read.
Kyle Mistele reframes agentic loops through control theory: a sensor measuring current state, a setpoint for the desired state, a controller computing an incremental change, an actuator applying it. This was helpful for me to think about it like vertical slices, where you try to provide small incremental value to the user rather than aiming for one big change.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Building an Internal Company Agent: 5 Things We Got Right and 5 I Would Do Differently
7 minutes read.
Great retrospective and takeaways from building an internal observability agent at [Bold.org](http://Bold.org ""). I think the biggest lever here is the first point: "Make usage visible early," making it a multiplayer game where you can see what others are doing and learn from them how to use the product better and faster: "Seeing real usage solves that problem. Someone asks a question in Slack, the agent investigates it, and ten other people see both the result and the way the question was asked. A product manager notices that it can inspect a user flow. Somebody in support realizes it can help investigate a report. An engineer sees it gather context they were about to collect manually."
Read it later via Instapaper.
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7 minutes read.
Great retrospective and takeaways from building an internal observability agent at [Bold.org](http://Bold.org ""). I think the biggest lever here is the first point: "Make usage visible early," making it a multiplayer game where you can see what others are doing and learn from them how to use the product better and faster: "Seeing real usage solves that problem. Someone asks a question in Slack, the agent investigates it, and ten other people see both the result and the way the question was asked. A product manager notices that it can inspect a user flow. Somebody in support realizes it can help investigate a report. An engineer sees it gather context they were about to collect manually."
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Share it via Twitter or email.
Attempting to Become an “Expert” With AI: Part 1
6 minutes read.
I always wondered how I could learn faster than most people and definitely more than what my current project requires. I had this idea of looking at effective knowledge over time, knowledge I not only recall but also know how to put into practice. Creating this newsletter was one way to do that: sharing some of my favorite readings with you and focusing on one area in the content. Copy Sandy Kwon's prompts to build a tool that can help you practice topics of interest deliberately.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
6 minutes read.
I always wondered how I could learn faster than most people and definitely more than what my current project requires. I had this idea of looking at effective knowledge over time, knowledge I not only recall but also know how to put into practice. Creating this newsletter was one way to do that: sharing some of my favorite readings with you and focusing on one area in the content. Copy Sandy Kwon's prompts to build a tool that can help you practice topics of interest deliberately.
Read it later via Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.
Inspiring Tweets
@DominikTornow: Software engineers: build a principled understanding of verification and testing. Fuzzing, property-based testing, deterministic simulation testing, formal verification. The generation half is done. The other half is yours.
- 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.