#252 – July 27, 2025
there's potential for critical information loss and errors to multiply
If writing is thinking…
3 minutes by Steven Sinofsky
The article discusses a concerning trend where business communications often go unread, and generative AI may exacerbate this problem. Steven shares personal experiences of writing important memos that few people fully read, despite their significance. With AI now generating content that even the nominal authors haven't thoroughly reviewed, there's potential for critical information loss and errors to multiply across organizations.
A Guide to Understanding APIs in the Automotive World
sponsored by CarsXE
For engineering leaders shaping the future of mobility, this guide explores how automotive APIs unlock real-time vehicle data for innovation. Learn how VIN decoding, telematics, and market data power scalable applications in fleet management, insurance, and more. Discover how CarsXE’s API can streamline development and drive smarter decision-making.
The cost of being wrong
5 minutes by Jack Vanlightly
Nick Lebesis argues that decisive founders who act quickly and fix mistakes outperform hesitant ones who get stuck in planning, highlighting that "wrong but decisive beats right but timid." Jack reflects on how this applies to technical decision-making, noting that different fields handle uncertainty based on their cost of failure.
Unlocking high software engineering pace
5 minutes by Jim Grey
Jim critiques the waterfall in two-week sprints approach where teams work for multiple sprints without delivering usable software to customers. Instead, he advocates for shipping minimal viable versions quickly. This provides faster business value, reduces risk, increases efficiency, creates competitive advantage, improves team morale, and minimizes opportunity costs.
Techniques for effective emails
10 minutes by Michael Lynch
For software developers, there’s tremendous value in writing effective emails. Good emails save time, reduce misunderstandings, and earn you recognition within your company. Michael focuses on five key qualities: clarity, action-orientation, relevance, efficiency, and brevity.
Moving from an orchestration-heavy to leadership-heavy management role
7 minutes by Will Larson
In this post Will argues that managers who transition from orchestration-heavy roles to leadership-heavy roles often face skill gaps when they fail to recognize that leadership requires problem discovery, solution exploration, and strategic direction-setting. While orchestration managers excel at prioritization and process, leadership roles demand identifying the right problems, determining solutions, explaining the path forward, and demonstrating progress.
Tests are dead. Meticulous AI is here.
sponsored by Meticulous
Meticulous automatically creates and maintains an exhaustive e2e UI test suite that covers every corner of your application – with no developer intervention required whatsoever. Dropbox, Lattice, Bilt Rewards and hundreds of organisations rely on Meticulous for their frontend testing. It is built from the Chromium level up with a deterministic scheduling engine – making it the only testing tool that eliminates flakes.
And the most popular article from the last issue was: