No-meeting-Friday held today, and I needed it. Email backlog cleared, RSS reader emptied, writing done, and multiple explorations completed. Enjoy your weekend!

[article] Are You Meeting the Needs of the People You Lead? (https://hbr.org/2026/05/are-you-meeting-the-needs-of-the-people-you-lead) What a great article. Do leaders fail because of bad judgement or character, or because there’s a mismatch between what they provide and followers need?

[article] How does deepening AI fluency change what it means to be a software developer? (https://rdel.substack.com/p/rdel-143-how-does-deepening-ai-fluency) Where do developers want to spend their time, and where do they want AI involved? This is an important read for any engineering manager.

[blog] Cloud CISO Perspectives: How Google + Wiz changes multicloud strategy for CISOs (https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/cloud-ciso-perspectives-how-google-wiz-changes-multicloud-strategy-for-cisos/). I get a firsthand look at the threats Google faces every day, and see how important it is to have a proactive, comprehensive security approach for all your infrastructure.

[article] Is Software Losing Its Head? (https://www.a16z.news/p/is-software-losing-its-head) Where does product defensibility move when all you are is an API? This a16z post mentions proprietary data, network coordination, and a couple other areas.

[article] Anthropic puts Claude agents on a meter across its subscriptions (https://www.infoworld.com/article/4171274/anthropic-puts-claude-agents-on-a-meter-across-its-subscriptions.html). It’s a trend. But not uniformly applied, and OpenAI is trying to take advantage of developer frustration with Anthropic. More here (https://thenewstack.io/anthropic-agent-sdk-credits/).

[blog] Announcing Genkit Middleware: Intercept, extend, and harden your agentic apps (https://developers.googleblog.com/announcing-genkit-middleware-intercept-extend-and-harden-your-agentic-apps/). My team builds this framework, and it’s an underrated way to add AI to new or existing apps.

[blog] Vercel AI SDK Middleware vs Genkit Middleware: A Hands-On Comparison (https://dzone.com/articles/ai-sdk-vs-genkit-middleware). Speaking of Genkit, I just read this extremely thorough look at the different philosophies and implementations of these popular AI frameworks.

[article] How to build a skills library for your engineering team (https://thenewstack.io/engineering-team-skills-library/). I expect to see more posts like this. How do you collect and share the right context across teams, not just for yourself?

[blog] New updates to A2UI and Flutter’s GenUI package (https://blog.flutter.dev/new-updates-to-a2ui-and-flutters-genui-package-e5ddff07737b). While this might mean you write MORE code, not less, this seems like a smart update to our package that helps you build generative UIs.

[blog] Why GKE for your AI Agent (https://medium.com/google-cloud/why-gke-for-your-ai-agent-43663d04f95f). I’m sold. Good case for using Kubernetes, especially if you already have models or workloads running there.

[blog] xAI Enters the Coding Agent Race With Grok Build (https://devops.com/xai-enters-the-coding-agent-race-with-grok-build/). Not a surprise, and I wouldn’t remotely discount the chances that this team builds something very useful and powerful. More here (https://x.ai/news/grok-build-cli).

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