📣 Headlines

• More than 10 European startups became unicorns this year , including Lovable, Fuse Energy, Mubi, and Isar Aerospace, signaling strong growth in the European tech ecosystem.

• Healthcare AI startup Assort Health raised $50M Series B at a $750M valuation to automate patient phone calls for specialty practices, while TransBnk secured $25M to digitize India's corporate banking infrastructure.

• Maisa AI raised $25M specifically to address enterprise AI's reported 95% failure rate through their HALP platform and agentic automation solutions.

• Meta is experiencing significant AI talent exodus from its Superintelligence Labs as the company burns billions pursuing AGI and shifts focus from metaverse to artificial intelligence.

• Early agentic AI platforms are gaining traction across customer support, sales, and enterprise workflows, with companies like Sendbird, MavenAGI, and Moveworks leading the charge.

• Rec Room laid off half its staff in a major shakeup affecting engineering, product, and operations teams at the Seattle-based VR startup.

• Uniphore acquired both Orby AI and Autonom8 to extend its AI-driven automation capabilities with RAG data access and low-code workflow tools.

• AI agents remain science fiction according to critics, with deployment gaps persisting despite advances from OpenAI, Anthropic, and other major players in the space.

🔧 Company Engineering Blogs

What the interns have wrought, 2025 edition (blog​.janestreet​.com) . Intern projects include Faster (J)SQL evaluation with JSQL, better Torch bindings via OxCaml, Memtrace memory leaks, and ref-counted shared memory with OxCaml modes

Moving ahead faster with fallbacks (booking​.ai) . Fallbacks in ranking service enable fast experimentation, reliability, and ML-induced innovation without outages

Breaking AI Testing Barriers: Dynamic Assertions and AI Automation Deliver 1000%+ Productivity Gains (engineering​.salesforce​.com) . AI quality testing, dynamic semantic assertions, AI evaluation pipelines, N-minus-one validation, LiveKit audio virtualization, prompt engineering, Gemini LLM prompts, Agentforce/Prompt Builder/Data Cloud integration

Rediscovering joy in learning: Jason Lengstorf on the state of development (github​.blog) . Jason Lengstorf on learning with curiosity, AI as a multiplier, open source sustainment, MCP, Zod, and the evolving JS/CSS landscape

Engineering stories behind the Medium Daily Digest Algorithm: Part 1 (medium​.engineering) . How Apple Mail Privacy Protection and filtering adjustments boosted digest quality and engagement through adjusted filtering rules and A/B testing

💻 Open Source & Developer Community

An Open Letter to Everyone I've Butted Heads With (andrewkelley​.me) . Open reflection on Zig project, creator empathy, and handling negative interactions in open-source governance and community

Intern projects that outlived the internship (blog​.trailofbits​.com) . Two AI-powered tools: a podcast workflow saving 1,250 hours annually and a Slack Exporter enabling enterprise knowledge retrieval

I tell you what I want, what I really, really want (bell​.bz) . Andy Bell seeks iPhone/Mac app ideas; OpenVibe critique; UI preferences; Set Studio and Piccalilli founder profile

The Art of Saying “No” to Shiny New Tools (brajeshwar​.com) . Critique of chasing shiny tools; advocates depth, discipline, and Stoic discernment over rapid adoption of new frameworks, APIs, and tech hype

How an EM’s Side Project Reached 1,800 GitHub Stars (newsletter​.manager​.dev) . EM builds Logdy, gains 1,800+ GitHub stars; weekend prototype to open-source tool; monetization, hiring AI, on-prem version, copilots, open source

Do the simplest thing that could possibly work (seangoedecke​.com) . Advocate for YAGNI-driven, Unix-lean designs: prefer in-memory solutions, Unicorn, edge proxy configs, and incremental scaling over premature infrastructure like Redis

🚀 Startup Strategy & Entrepreneurship

Introducing CapitalStack by Thesis Driven (thesisdriven​.com) . CapitalStack builds a searchable 2,000+ investor database with profiles, matchmaking, and founder community for real estate capital raising

The real dilemmas of cybersecurity startup ideation, discovery, and validation (ventureinsecurity​.net) . Contrarian startup ideation in cybersecurity: break the echo chamber, talk to diverse end users, and pursue deep tech moats over AI hype

What It Really Takes to Build an Inc. 5000 Company Without a Dime of VC (stacker​.com) . Bootstrapping to Inc. 5000: hiring without funding, advisors via 2% equity, revenue-first strategy, interns as leverage, advisory board insights

A Business Model for AI (bayesianinvestor​.com) . AI-managed startups, incubator model, compute limits, safety testing, trade secrets, VC profits, nanotech, hedge funds, Drexler, 2028-2033 horizon

Building Something Big (allenpike​.com) . Indie vs. venture-scale paths, Forestwalk, LLM evals product pivot, runway concepts, VC-style metrics, and attracting world-class teams

Stockholm and ambition (louiscb​.com) . Founder quitting job, Stockholm startup scene, Paul Graham reference, unicorns, summer work culture, 60–70 hour weeks, Dealroom ranking, embargoed summer shutdown

Launching Arena (forwardthinking​.substack​.com) . Arena ranks founders on fundability via weekly scores, AMAs with tech titans, fundraising workshops, and investor introductions

👥 Engineering Leadership & Management

Thoughts on (Amazonian) Leadership (daemonology​.net) . Amazon's leadership, multi-AZ resilience, Paxos avoidance, internal building blocks, bar raisers, and cross-team trust issues at AWS and FreeBSD experience

Stripe CTO on What Grew His Career, Hiring Without Leetcode, Coding as a Leader (Career Story) (developing​.dev) . Stripe CTO discusses career growth, hiring without Leetcode, engineering leadership, Google tenure, Android Wear, engineer-acation, PM vs EM, TLM, Apollo Translate, and culture

The Making of a Decision - Part 1 (roundcrisis​.com) . Decision-making, power structures, knowledge access, authority, charisma, information hoarding, and organisational dynamics in software teams

Using AI to Reduce the Burden of Status Reporting (code​.dblock​.org) . AI-driven status summaries from GitHub, Slack, and other channels; GSD approach; hierarchy critique; emphasis on hiring, strategy, and deep work

Reflecting on Complexity Theory and my Problem of Practice (justinribeiro​.com) . Reflecting on complexity theory, wicked problems, leadership, self-organization, and interviews in software teams via Grint, Rittel & Webber, Klieb et al, Ramalingam & Jones, Houchin & MacLean

🤖 AI Development & Coding Revolution

Some thoughts on LLMs and Software Development (martinfowler​.com) . LLMs as auto-complete vs direct code reading; future of programming; AI bubble; hallucinations as feature; testing, non-determinism, and security risks in agentic browsers

Side Projects and AI (josem​.co) . AI tools like Claude Code shrink software creation; shifts in job market; emphasizes selling, customers, and non-technical skills

Hitting the Wall with Vibe Coding (512pixels​.net) . AI-assisted iOS podcast client attempts fail, highlighting issues with vacuumed UI changes and build errors using GPT-5 and Claude

Are You Ready for AI Coding? (everything​.intellectronica​.net) . Self-assessment for AI coding; explores AI-assisted development, workflows, mindset shifts, and career impact

The $20/Month Software Revolution (tomtunguz​.com) . AI coding tools like Cursor and Lovable enable non-technical founders to prototype apps in hours for $20/month, disrupting traditional dev workflows

Thoughts on AI in Engineering (alt​.management) . Hypothetical AI rollout in engineering; critical, reflective, personal journey; hype, FOMO, deadlines, therapy, alt.management

Roadmap: Developer Tooling for Software 3.0 (nextbigteng​.substack​.com) . From Hello, World to Hello, AI: AI-native development, memory management, MCP, agent experience, and prompts-as-programs shaping Software 3.0

I Managed a Swarm of 20 AI Agents for a Week and Built a Product. Here Are the 8 Rules I Learned. (zachwills​.net) . Building a production-ready app with ~20 AI agents, a parallelization tool, sub-agent memory management, Playwright/Neon MCPs, and an autonomous loop approach

📱 Product Development & Validation

How to turn meeting notes into prototypes that your sales team can immediately demo to customers | Anjan Panneer Selvam (Acolyte Health) (lennysnewsletter​.com) . Transform meeting notes into interactive prototypes with ChatGPT, Lovable, Gamma, Perplexity, ChatPRD, Rork, and more for sales demos

How PMs Build Fintech Prototypes with Replit + Plaid (blog​.replit​.com) . PMs prototype Plaid-powered fintech integrations with Replit in minutes for demos, validation, and stakeholder buy-in

Suchita Kaundin on our Market Exploration Bootcamp (skmurphy​.com) . Suchita Kaundin praises SKMurphy Market Exploration Bootcamp; highlights ongoing mentorship, top-of-funnel guidance, and actionable feedback for early-stage startups

Building an app that no one uses is useless (suramya​.com) . Startup failures: a 300k patient-management app for doctors with flawless tech but poor workflow fit; importance of user-centric design and product-team collaboration

Good Work Attracts Good Work (craigjamieson​.com) . Good work as a differentiator: prioritizing outcomes, budgets, timelines, user experience, and market validation over flashy deliverables

Malleable Software: code → low-code → no-code (mdubakov​.me) . Malleable software layers: code, low-code, no-code; tools like Cursor, Lovable, Retool, Airtable, Notion, Fibery; AI-enabled paradigms for internal tools

🏢 Tech Platforms & Infrastructure

Launch HN: Bitrig (YC S25) – Build Swift apps on your iPhone (news​.ycombinator​.com) . Bitrig enables building native Swift iOS apps directly on iPhone using Claude Sonnet 4.0, a Swift interpreter, on-device previews, and optional server-side App Store distribution

Discussing 10 years of orchestration challenges with Erik Munson, founding engineer at Day AI, ex-HubSpot, and Netflix Engineer (inngest​.com) . Erik Munson discusses HubSpot, Netflix, and Day AI: real-time processing, Kafka, Redis, Spinnaker, Temporal, Inngest, and Lambda-driven orchestration at scale

I'm Still Here! Let's Catch Up. (materializedview​.io) . Updates on Designing Data-Intensive Applications, SlateDB, ZeroFS, SSI, IVM, AI tooling, and Materialized View Capital portfolio

Writing Mac and iOS Apps Shouldn’t Be So Difficult (inessential​.com) . Frontier-era scripting, hash-table persistence, frictionless iteration, and a call for a modern DSL to simplify Mac/iOS app development

Alphabet Inc. (acquired​.fm) . Alphabet Inc. history, Google product growth 1998–2011, Google 2.0, Gmail, Maps, Drive, Docs, YouTube, Chrome, Android, Photos, Google Plus failure, Alphabet transformation, AI revolution

Stream Work Note (rob​.crabapples​.net) . Rob Fahrni chronicles Sunday coding sessions on Stream, beta release 1.6.0, subscriptions UI ideas, SwiftUI vs AppKit on Mac, and future feed recommendations

👋 Before you go

I've got a big favor to ask - keeping Blaze running isn't expensive, but it does all add up, so I'm asking readers like you to help, if you can. That's why I'm launching a Patreon page! . Nothing flashy, just a way for folks who find value in these newsletters to chip in a little each month. In return, you'll get:

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