Tuesday 1st April’s issue is presented by Augment Code |
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Most coding AI struggles with complex codebases. Not Augment Code. |
Augment is the only AI coding assistant that: |
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Trusted by engineering teams at Datastax, Lemonade, GoFundMe and Kong to tame complexity and maintain flow. |
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— Will Larson |
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tl;dr: Will discusses: (1) The various ways that are frequently suggested for evaluating strategies, such as input-only evaluation, output-only evaluation, and so on. (2) A rubric for evaluating strategies, and why a useful rubric has to recognize that strategies have to be evaluated in phases rather than as a unified construct. (3) Why ending a strategy is often a sign of a good strategist, and sometimes the natural reaction to a new phase in a strategy, rather than a judgment on prior phases. And more. |
Leadership Management |
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— James Stanier |
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tl;dr: James discusses “what leadership should do from the perspective of the productivity of teams and organizations, and consequently how we should think about spending our budgets to make that happen. There are plenty of hot takes out there on AI. This is not intended to be one of them.” |
Leadership Management |
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— Tongfei Chen, Yury Zemlyanskiy |
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tl;dr: The post introduces AugmentQA, a benchmark for evaluating code retrieval systems using real-world software development scenarios rather than synthetic problems. AugmentQA uses codebases, developer questions, and keyword-based evaluation outperforming open-source models that excel on synthetic benchmarks but struggle with realistic tasks. |
Promoted by Augment Code |
Management Tests AI |
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— Sean Goedecke |
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tl;dr: “In the glory days of the 2010s, tech companies were very invested in their employees’ work-life balance. Those glory days are over. Anecdotally, tech company executives are now internally directing their employees to work harder and faster, with the new threat of layoffs adding weight to that directive. Engineers are rightfully scared. What should we do?” |
CareerAdvice |
“The function of good software is to make the complex appear to be simple.” | | | | — Grady Booch |
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tl;dr: Anthropic presents research on interpreting how Claude "thinks" internally. By developing an ""AI microscope,"" they examine the mechanisms behind Claude's abilities across languages, reasoning, poetry, and mathematics. These insights not only reveal cognitive strategies and efforts to make AI more transparent. |
AI LLM |
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— Arjun Iyer |
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tl;dr: Duplicating microservice environments for testing creates unsustainable costs and operational complexity. Instead, modern engineering teams are adopting application-layer isolation with "sandboxes" - sharing underlying infrastructure while maintaining isolation through smart request routing. This approach cuts infrastructure costs by over 90% while enabling 10x faster testing cycles and boosting developer productivity. |
Promoted by Signadot |
Microservices |
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— Eliran Turgeman |
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tl;dr: "There are many pitfall that can lead to useless, wasteful and confusing logs. Therefore I follow a specific set of practices which allows me to write better logs while also being consistent across the system." Eliran discusses here. |
Logging BestPractices |
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— Ted Neward |
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tl;dr: Over the last two years, we've seen a dramatic policy debate playing out on the feeds of LinkedIn: "WFH vs RTO". Nearly everyone has an opinion, and many of them are held strongly. Some are held based on data, some on personal preference, and many are based on personal experience. Nearly all of them, however, focus on the wrong part of the debate: it's not really about "WFH vs RTO", but about "async vs sync". |
Leadership Management |
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tl;dr: This blog post describes how we made efficiency improvements to Uber’s Experimentation platform to reduce the latencies of experiment evaluations by a factor of 100x, milliseconds to microseconds. We accomplished this by going from a remote evaluation architecture to a local evaluation architecture. |
Architecture Tests |
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Most Popular From Last Issue |
Some Cool Terminal Things I've Found Recently — Neil Macy |
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Notable Links |
Carbon: OS design system. |
FastMCP: Pythonic way to build MCP servers. |
GitDiagram: Interactive diagrams for GitHub repos. |
LLM Apps: Collection of awesome LLM apps. |
PLS: Language server for Postgres. |
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How did you like this issue of Pointer? 1 = Didn't enjoy it all // 5 = Really enjoyed it | | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
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