📣 Headlines

• AI is reshaping software assurance as Greptile raises $25M to take on CodeRabbit and Graphite in code validation and Aikido acquires Allseek and Haicker to deliver sub-hour automated penetration testing .

• Google unveiled Gemini Robotics 1.5 and ER 1.5 to boost vision‑language‑action capabilities and cross-robot learning , underscoring a broader push toward ‘Physical AI’ as the next wave beyond LLMs .

• Fundrise is backing publicly registered, evergreen VC funds as venture capital aims to broaden access .

• Blue Origin plans to ramp New Shepard flights to near-weekly and assess new spaceports while also winning NASA’s VIPER lunar delivery under a $190M CLPS award .

• Space/IoT infrastructure advances as Geespace secures $281M for its Geesatcom IoT constellation and new HQ and Skynopy wins ESA support to test adaptive modulation for Earth observation .

• Meta is rolling out a ‘pay or consent’ ad model in the UK with a £2.99/month ad‑free option , following EU pushback on the approach .

• Google expanded its cheaper AI Plus plan with Gemini 2.5 Pro and creation tools to 40+ countries .

• Google and Qualcomm signaled deeper desktop Android and cross‑device integration for PCs and ChromeOS .

🔧 Company Engineering Blogs

How Palantir’s Strategic Privacy Investments Enable Future Customer Success (blog​.palantir​.com) . Strategic privacy tools like Checkpoints enable governance, e-signature compliance, and human-in-the-loop AI oversight across Foundry and AIP

How to estimate correlation between metrics from past A/B tests (booking​.ai) . Combining naive proxy–goal correlations with a Total Covariance Estimator to correct measurement noise in A/B tests

Beyond Winning: Spotify’s Experiments with Learning Framework (engineering​.atspotify​.com) . Spotify's Confidence platform powers Experiments with Learning (EwL) to maximize information gain from tests across hundreds of teams

How AI Tools Cut Customer Escalation Time: From Days of Manual Work to Minutes (engineering​.salesforce​.com) . AI-powered agents and automation cut manual data collection, enable pattern-based problem solving, and accelerate escalations for Customer Centric Engineering at Salesforce

GitHub Copilot gets smarter at finding your code: Inside our new embedding model (github​.blog) . Copilot embeds a new code/documentation embedding model to improve code search in VS Code with faster retrieval and smaller memory footprint

🛤️ Founder and Career Journeys

Floating On (ashfurrow​.com) . Former Float engineer reflects on leadership, startup intensity, personal growth, and lessons learned while launching the mobile app

Making $145k a year from job boards (nocsdegree​.com) . Self-taught developer builds multiple job boards and a side business, focusing on sustainable jobs and minimal overhead

This Wittgenstein Scholar Built a $16 Billion Startup | Marcus Ryu, Oxford (johnathanbi​.com) . Wittgenstein scholar Marcus Ryu built Guidewire, linking Marx's alienation to startup motivation and leadership styles

Developer Roundtable - Gripes and Empathy (beflagrant​.com) . Explores soft deletion approaches (deleted_at timestamps vs views) and the human side of open source, including empathy for maintainers and the to-build-or-borrow dilemma

Reflections from my first company (ellispinsky​.com) . Entrepreneurial journey in a B2B IT startup: market validation, branding, SEO, analytics, pilots, and lessons on funding and team dynamics

What's next for manager.dev and for me (newsletter​.manager​.dev) . Anton Zaides shares an 8-month career break, lessons learned, and plans for manager.dev, sponsorships, courses, and a return to full-time EM roles

Machines Room Manifestos: Month One on Mars (seuros​.com) . Two engineers on Mars secretly share advice in the underground, debating shipping, impostor syndrome, and iterative work

🛰️ AI Ecosystem, Sovereignty, and Infra

How to get the most out of your product pass, part 1 (lennysnewsletter​.com) . Tips for premium subscribers: eight tools for PMs, plus workflows with Replit, Warp, Gamma 3.0, Magic Patterns, Descript, Underlord, Wispr Flow, and more

Some AI surprises in late 2025 (rubick​.com) . Slack as a data lake for LLMs, automated status updates, privacy concerns, and automated verification in 2025 tech workflows

Digital Sovereignty as Self-Understanding (innoq​.com) . Digital sovereignty framed as the capability of European teams to solve problems and develop alternatives to Google, AWS, and Microsoft 365 through effective, sovereign teams

AI #135: OpenAI Shows Us The Money (lesswrong​.com) . OpenAI funding scale and product launches; GPT-5, Opus, Claude Sonnet, SWE-Bench Pro, AI economics papers, and policy debates

My DIY Cloud: Grafana, Strapi, LLMs, and Beyond (madanbhintade​.substack​.com) . Self-hosted toolkit with Grafana, Strapi, n8n, and LLMs for private, flexible cloud tooling

💸 Venture Capital, Diligence, and Founder Signaling

🎧🍌 Untold Startup Lessons from Dozens of Academic Research Papers with Dan Gray at Equidam (thespl​.it) . Dan Gray of Equidam discusses origination capital, VC patterns, startup catering, AI bubble signals, and mega-fund roles with data from Venture papers

Daybreak: The Two-Year Update (digitalnative​.tech) . Daybreak’s two-year progress, sourcing craft, founder x-factor, and premium-first VC approach with content-driven network effects

Announcing Two New AC EIRs (alsoblogposts​.com) . Also Capital announces Nathaniel Krasnoff and Dan Bilen as second Entrepreneurs-in-Residence, highlighting robotics, autonomy, fintech, and hard-tech leadership

Hello, Nodestacker! (forwardthinking​.substack​.com) . Arena evolves into Nodestacker, a founder credentialing platform balancing signal, progress, and effort to connect founders with investors

The Art of Spotting Greatness (alsoblogposts​.com) . CEO-driven recruitment to reach talent density; authentic, actionable insights from recruiters in tech and government-focused teams

The Hidden ROI of Technical Due Diligence in Software Investments (woodruff​.dev) . Technical due diligence uncovers codebase quality, architecture scalability, security posture, and licensing to protect and accelerate growth

🎯 Product Strategy and PMF Lessons

High-growth startups: Uber and CloudKitchens with Charles-Axel Dein (newsletter​.pragmaticengineer​.com) . Lessons from Uber and CloudKitchens on hyper-growth, productivity, incidents, hiring, and building durable software skills

Users Only Care About 20% of Your Application (idiallo​.com) . 20% of features satisfy most users; tools like VS Code, Notion, Figma, FFmpeg, Blender, Slack, Discord illustrate building for a focused slice

Obsidian’s Quiet Climb to the Top of SaaS Security in the Age of AI (greylock​.com) . Obsidian CEO Hasan Imam leads a SaaS security pivot, leveraging AI-era SaaS threats and a product-first growth strategy

The Ownership Paradox: What Do You Really Control in Your Software Business? (thebootstrappedfounder​.com) . Ownership paradox in software: control, dependencies, fallbacks, and data ownership for bootstrapped SaaS businesses

Stop Debugging the Code, Start Debugging the Company (gaiwan​.co) . Shifting focus from code to the socio-technical system that creates and sustains software products

A New Chapter for Mixpanel: My Conversation with CEO Jen Taylor (dataanalysis​.substack​.com) . Jen Taylor discusses Mixpanel's AI-driven shift from reactive to proactive analytics, customer-centric culture, and global product strategy

👥 Leading Engineering Teams

Minimum Viable Engineering Management (mikemcquaid​.com) . Explains minimum viable engineering management: regular 1:1s, feedback, unblocking, holidays, notes, and balancing manager vs. individual contribution

How to Lead in a Room Full of Experts (idiallo​.com) . Leading in expert rooms: translating across teams, aligning goals, and balancing dialogue, expectations, and timelines

Empowerment, job descriptions, and side projects 💡 (refactoring​.fm) . Empowerment vs direction, standout job descriptions, and four reasons for side projects with insights from Lara Hogan and Vic Vijayakumar

How to boost your management impact with AI tools (leaddev​.com) . AI tools reduce overhead in performance reviews, design decisions, and async communication for engineering managers using Linked data and Claude/GPT workflows

The Missing Spine of the Product Operating Model (differentshelf​.com) . Centre of Excellence acts as the spine coordinating autonomous squads, transferring knowledge through guilds, and balancing performance with sustained disruption

Scaling Engineering Teams: Lessons from Google, Facebook, and Netflix (greenido​.wordpress​.com) . Three scaling factors from Google, Facebook, and Netflix — goals, autonomy, and code quality for teams from 10 to 1000+ engineers

🧭 Spec-Driven Dev and Operator Mindset

You Still Need to Think (calv​.info) . Thinking budgets in coding tools differ by UX, from Codex Cloud to Claude Code and Cursor, shaping how users plan and implement

The Rise of the Operator (markmaunder​.com) . AI agents, Codex and Claude Code, Ops role, PLAN.md, AGENTS.md, AI industrial psychology, Operator concept, mission-driven delivery

A Modern Approach to Engineering (differentshelf​.com) . Modern engineering practices, trunk-based monorepos, chaos engineering, inner sourcing, and data as a product drive faster, safer software at scale

Mental Flexibility as a Software Engineering Maturity Metric (alexdong​.com) . Mental flexibility as a key maturity axis; tradeoffs, AGENTS.md, and reflecting on values for engineering decisions

On Specifications, Software and Tools (dsyme​.net) . Mental charts on Intent/Actualisation Toolchains, SpecLang, Codeplain, Copilot Workspace, App Dev Toolchains, SpecKit, and Spec-driven programming ideas

Intent Prototyping: The Allure And Danger Of Pure Vibe Coding In Enterprise UX (Part 1) (smashingmagazine​.com) . Yegor Gilyov critiques mockup-centric UX and examines AI-powered 'vibe coding' versus intent-driven prototyping for enterprise apps

Responsibility and Authority (functional​.computer) . Explores responsibility and authority in software teams, from legacy ‘build it, run it’ gaps to language choices and team autonomy

🧠 Engineering Philosophy and Contrarian Takes

Further examples of group madness in technology (scottlocklin​.wordpress​.com) . Smart people chase trends, from battery airplanes to distributed manufacturing and Lisp critiques, with reflections on CORBA, Prolog, Java and DOCs

Code Project Bait (synystron​.substack​.com) . Critique of GitHub code projects that promise instant, unique tools while potentially exposing code and secrets globally

The Four Pillars of Career Growth for Software Engineers (hamy​.xyz) . Four pillars: Technical Skill, Project Execution, Product Thinking, and People Skills shape career growth for software engineers

Re: My Software Engineering Guiding Principles - Part 1 (rodhilton​.com) . Rod Hilton outlines guiding software engineering principles: strong opinions, refactoring over rewrites, boring technologies, 3AM understandability, and delivering working software early

Are Software Engineering Teams Necessary (alnewkirk​.com) . Explores decline of strict teams for ownership as AI enables individuals to deliver end-to-end outcomes

Vantage on management: No instructions for engineering (tiendil​.org) . Vantage on management argues that detailed instructions fail for creative, knowledge-work like software engineering; promote guidelines, constraints, and team-based metrics

🤖 Vibe & Agentic Coding in Practice

Shipping like Claude Code ⚡ (refactoring​.fm) . Shipping fast like Claude Code: small AI-assisted, prototype-driven teams, CLI workflows, extensive testing, and per‑engineer releases

Vibe Coding, Clarity Supremacy, and Software Engineering’s Future (blog​.bencope​.land) . Vibe coding, Clarity Supremacy, tacit knowledge, normal accidents, residuality theory, and the shift toward systems engineering futures

Are You Vibe Coding? (aakashg​.com) . Vibe coding as a core PM skill, using AI for brainstorming, AI-generated prototype, and refining PRDs before build

The Future of Agentic Coding is Multiplayer (aviator​.co) . Multiplayer runbooks, spec-driven AI development, and shared prompts to scale agentic coding across teams

Is Vibe Coding Just a Cost Cutting Strategy, like Outsourcing/Offshore Development? (nicksnettravels​.builttoroam​.com) . Explores Vibe Coding, AI-assisted tooling, app builders, IDE integrations like Copilot and Codex, costs, and impacts on architecture and productivity

Every programmer will be fullstack (kojo​.blog) . AI-assisted tooling enables a single developer to design and build full web apps, reducing the need for specialist roles

🔗 How Claude Code is built (kyleolivo​.github​.io) . Claude Code development relies on LLMs for coding tasks and a spec-driven, test-led workflow

👋 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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