📣 Headlines

• Perplexity AI made a surprise $34.5bn bid to acquire Google Chrome amid antitrust scrutiny and industry debate , promising to maintain open-source Chromium and Google as default search.

• Sam Altman's new startup Merge Labs aims to compete with Neuralink in developing brain-computer interfaces backed by OpenAI , focusing on merging humans and machines through brain implants and AI integration.

• OpenAI reverted to GPT-4o as default after GPT-5's troubled launch , citing speed and accuracy issues, while analysis suggests GPT-5 falls short of AGI expectations despite improvements in user experience.

• California attracts nearly two-thirds of U.S. venture funding led by AI unicorns, while global unicorn count exceeded 1,600 with 13 new additions in July from sectors including AI, e-commerce, and healthcare.

• Biotech IPOs slumped in 2025 with just 16 debuts and venture funding down approximately 25%, signaling challenging market conditions for life sciences companies.

• Squint secured $40M in Series B funding to develop AI and augmented reality platforms for manufacturing, while Datumo raised $15.5M backed by Salesforce Ventures for AI trust and safety tools.

• Workday acquired Flowise to boost AI-powered workflows , integrating low-code AI agent building capabilities into HR and finance operations through visual drag-and-drop development.

• Winklevoss twins' crypto company Gemini filed for IPO on Nasdaq despite reporting 2024 net losses of $158.5M on $142.2M revenue amid the crypto market recovery.

🔧 Company Engineering Blogs

LLM Evaluation: Practical Tips at Booking.com (booking​.ai) . Evaluates LLMs using a 'judge-LLM' framework with golden datasets, annotation protocols, prompt engineering, and metrics like accuracy, F1-score, for optimizing Generative AI applications

Intern Experience at Lyft (eng​.lyft​.com) . Lyft data scientists Morteza Taiebat and Han Gong recount internships on Sustainability and Driver Loyalty teams, using difference-in-differences, hierarchical linear models, CPIDH, causal prediction, and budget optimization for EV adoption, driver productivity, and referral incentives

How Cursor AI Cut Legacy Code Coverage Time by 85% (engineering​.salesforce​.com) . Cursor AI reduces legacy code coverage effort from 26 to 4 engineer days per module, achieving 80% coverage across 76 repos, with AI-generated tests, iterative class-by-class analysis, and human oversight

Migrating Airbnb’s JVM Monorepo to Bazel (medium​.com/airbnb-engineering) . Airbnb migrated their JVM monorepo from Gradle to Bazel, optimizing build speed, reliability, and scalability through remote execution, sandboxing, automated build file generation, and multi-version library support

Thumbtack’s Journey to Swift 6 (medium​.com/thumbtack-engineering) . Thumbtack's engineering team documents their migration from Swift 5 to Swift 6, focusing on adopting Swift concurrency, handling warnings, errors, runtime checks, testing stability, and dependency challenges

💰 VC & Investment Landscape

I’m joining a16z (alexdanco​.com) . Alex Danco joins a16z as Editor at Large, emphasizing the power of writing for legitimacy, the role of blogging, podcasts, and how VC content transfers power to founders

Oxide is crossing the chasm (changelog​.com) . Bryan Cantrill discusses Oxide Computer Company's $100M Series B, uniform compensation, AI datacenter roles, scaling to 50+ rack orders, and avoiding Silicon Valley tropes

MiB: Deven Parekh, Insight Partners on PE/VC (ritholtz​.com) . Deven Parekh of Insight Partners discusses growth equity, venture capital vs private equity, enterprise software, data and consumer internet bets, board roles, macro themes, and how Insight blends VC/PE approaches

How to Think Like a VC When Evaluating a Startup Role (thecaringtechie​.com) . Explores a VC-inspired checklist for evaluating startups and roles, focusing on market size, team capabilities, business viability, and strategic fit for candidates making career decisions

📈 Startup Journeys & Growth

Educational Products: Month 10 (mtlynch​.io) . Michael reflects on progress with his book 'Refactoring English', discusses outreach efforts, marketing, website metrics, social media habits, sleep issues, editing procrastination, and reimplementing an app with Hugo

OnlineOrNot Diaries 25: you can just build things (maxrozen​.com) . You can just build things using the language you know; ship fast, iterate, and fix as you go, from AWS Lambda to VPS, then Cloudflare Workers, with PostgreSQL to ClickHouse

“Say hi to Paul Graham for me” (mrsteinberg​.com) . Founder recalls hacking Tutorspree, reverse shells, PHP upload vulnerabilities, YC experience, remote job offer, fundraising 1.7M, demo day, Pakible rivalry, Walmart/ Soylent talks, and startup dissolution

Exclusive: How Cloudbeds Went From San Diego Small Tech Startup to Global Hospitality Software Leader (businessofsandiego​.substack​.com) . San Diego startup Cloudbeds evolved over 12 years through AI integration, raising $250M, serving 135+ countries, focusing on hotel management, revenue, distribution, and remote culture

Startups to Watch & Tech Talents (juliadeluca​.substack​.com) . Highlights LatAm startups in stealth mode, featuring Viti AI’s automation-driven sales AI, along with profiles of stealth founders from São Paulo and Mexico City with diverse backgrounds

🚀 Product Building & Validation

Yes, but who said they'd actually BUY the damn thing? (longform​.asmartbear​.com) . Prove product viability by securing ten paying customers; critique of 'scratching your own itch'; interviews and validation tactics from The Mom Test, Lean Startup, and Eric Ries; WP Engine case study

Great products are made by small teams of specialists (uxdesign​.cc) . Small teams of specialists disrupt the status quo: startups agility, autonomy, talent density, cross-functional collaboration, lean processes, minimal bureaucracy, rapid iteration with ChatGPT, Apple’s Jobs-era practices, and measurable effects on innovation across tech history

7 Counterintuitive Insights: How to Vibe-Code Full Stack AI Products (newsletter​.pmcurve​.com) . Insights on product thinking, AI app risk management, bug-fixing with troubleshooting frameworks, scaling AI prototypes, patience with LLMs, sequential development, and annual skill investment strategies

Cake (markboulton​.co​.uk) . Two things: what we ship and good teams; a layered MVP analogy with a cake metaphor—Icing, Interface, Features, Capabilities, Technical architecture—emphasizing delivering a whole slice

Vibe Coding and The Illusion of Progress (productify​.substack​.com) . Vibe coding accelerates prototyping with AI, but risks misalignment: validation, user research, and disciplined discovery remain essential to solve real problems and avoid security debt

🤖 AI-Powered Development

Rebalancing Buy vs Build with AI (andrew-best​.com) . AI tools in software engineering: Claude Code, LangSmith, Braintrust, evals, OpenTelemetry, .NET, Semantic Kernel, Blazor, XUnit, OpenTelemetry, agent-based AI, and the buy vs build shift at Octopus

How Context Mastery Creates the New 10x Engineer (cacm​.acm​.org) . Context mastery as a multiplier for engineers: AI-assisted coding, knowledge capture, cross-domain integration, knowledge architecture, context-enhanced AI utilization, onboarding, and team amplification

ML for SWEs 63: Engineers just got a whole lot more important (mlforswes​.com) . Discusses AI's scaling limits, emphasizing smart engineering, system integration, inference-time scaling, model efficiency, and key opportunities for software engineers in integrating, optimizing, and deploying AI models

Software on Demand: from IDEs to Intent (metrics​.blogg​.gu​.se) . GPT-5, agentic workflows, and software on demand: from IDEs to intent; OpenAI’s Responses API, agent tooling, SWE-bench Verified, tests, CI, and guardrails in product teams

Software Engineering (for small teams) with Agentic AI (blog​.alexsanjoseph​.com) . Small team AI software engineering: one-week cycles, PR avalanche, stacked PRs, Claude-based automation, worktrees for reviews, intensified code reviews, test quality over quantity, alternating code/review days, architecture discipline, 2x velocity, UI/UX polish, and implications for scalability

God Mode (accelerateordie​.com) . Startup CEO turned AI powerhouse clones advisors and CTOs, using Cursor, Claude Code, Cursor CLI Agent, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and deep research to orchestrate agentic management and rapid problem-solving

The Mars Speech: Crossing the AI Event Horizon (seuros​.com) . Mars Speech examines AI-augmented development disruption: event horizon metaphor, Three Types of Mars Colonists, Bootstrap Protocol, LLM Requirements Definition Language, Terraform Initiative, Hunger Protocol, and an emphasis on rapid shipping and AI-driven architecture

From Nerd-Sniped to Shipped: How I Used AI as a Thinking Tool (Not a Shortcut) (dspn​.substack​.com) . A developer details how he used AI as a thinking amplifier over months, focusing on graph-based memory design, architecture critique, testing automation, and integrating NetworkX graphs for improved system robustness

🔧 Development Tools & Infrastructure

Cloud Development Environments Tame Complexity By Reducing State (tidyfirst​.substack​.com) . Remote development environments, cloud-based dev containers, GitPod, VSCode, JetBrains, state variability, irreversibility, XP, Enrico Zaninotto model, pre-built environments, CodeRabbit, AI-assisted coding, Ruby, Gusto, productivity gains

Val Town for Teams (blog​.val​.town) . Val Town for Teams introduces a private beta for developers, enabling quick TypeScript deployment, no-code automation, and shared resources via Val Town Orgs, with startups automating workflows across GitHub, Slack, and more

The Long Game: why Rails survived the hype cycle and what it means for your startup (evilmartians​.com) . Rails survived the hype cycle: Rails 8, YJIT/ZJIT, Sorbet, typelizer, Hotwire, Inertia, Big Tent design with adaptable interfaces, and startups like Chime, Figma, Stripe, Bolt.new

Building a production MCP server (and, incidentally, $45M/mo in ad spend) (i-admin​.cetico​.org) . Engineer builds a production MCP server utilizing Meta's API, Vercel, DigitalOcean, Supabase, OpenAI, Anthropic, Discord, and PostHog to automate Instagram ad campaigns efficiently

Tool-Agnostic, Problem-Centric: The Real Developer’s Advantage (lassala​.net) . Tool-agnostic problem solving, language shifts from FoxPro to .NET, Ruby; AI-driven development; focus on communication, clarity, modern tools like Rider AI; community learning; strategic growth

👥 Engineering Leadership & Career

The Ultimate Sprint Retro: My 10 Years of Software Engineering (mensurdurakovic​.com) . Ten-year software career from basics to leadership, covering refactoring, design patterns, code reviews, client relations, team coordination, discipline, Stoicism, AI hype, layoffs, management transition perspective

Ask a newsroom technology leader (werd​.io) . Ben Werdmuller discusses newsroom tech leadership, startup CTO experience, Latakoo video-gathering platform, Matter Ventures, The 19th, ProPublica, and questions about future news tech strategy and governance

From Stress Test to Skills Test: A Smarter Approach to Technical Interviews (samuelmullen​.com) . Smarter approach to technical interviews replaces stress tests with real-world code tasks, code reviews, and interactive dialogue using existing production code bases

A Personal Update: New Role, Same Focus (sleepingpotato​.com) . Principal Engineer at North shift from leadership to IC, exploring cloud services, Python, Ruby love affair, Looping side project, advising limited, broad tech and leadership insights from TaxJar to Recharge

Engineering Management in the Age of Agents (newsletter​.manager​.dev) . Explores how engineering managers will adapt in an AI-driven world, emphasizing understanding business, technical guidance, people skills, and tools like Unblocked for context gathering

🏢 Company Culture & Operations

What’s it like to work at Nubank? Inside the process of turning ideas into solutions (building​.nubank​.com) . Insights into Nubank’s collaborative processes, involving teams like software engineering, product management, data science, internal audit, and customer service, utilizing AI, ML, infrastructure, and risk management tools

It’s never done (ryanckulp​.com) . Burnout, IT’s never done, and the psychology of continuous tech work; Ryan Kulp discusses postmortems, perpetual deployment, ‘finished_at’ timestamps, and celebrating done moments in TRMNL firmware, releases, and support article gains

To solve security problems, you don’t have to build a security company (ventureinsecurity​.net) . Explores how security outcomes can be achieved via products like Chromebooks, Slack, Vanta, Okta, and Chainguard by integrating security into user experience, compliance, productivity, and workflows

AI skeptic and EM of an AI team: balancing two worlds and leading the team to success (rarlindseysmash​.com) . AI skeptic leads Copilot experiences on GitHub.com, balancing transparency in 1:1s, product-engineering tension, and deep research to justify user value and safety guardrails

Chapter 7: High Priests of Techno-Solutionism (fintechdystopia​.com) . Silicon Valley elite values, PayPal Mafia origins, blitzscaling, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Rene Girard, mimetic transmission, AI-first mind virus, PayPal’s growth playbook, and climate of tech culture

📊 Technical Insights & Expertise

TechIreland National AI Challenge 2025 (seanblanchfield​.com) . Sean Blanchfield discusses building AI-native applications, leveraging tools like GPT, Claude, WindSurf, N8N, markdown-based documentation, prompt chaining, and AI collaboration strategies

Are we replaced by AI yet? (unskilled​.blog) . Acceleration, semantic debt, and AI-assisted coding with LLMs (Claude Code, Copilot/Cursor, Jules); Mozannar, Tang, Sparrow, Grinshgl, Singh studies; Deleuze, Rosa; privacy notice

“My biggest lesson was realizing that domain expertise matters more than algorithmic complexity.“ (towardsdatascience​.com) . Claudia Ng highlights domain expertise over algorithmic novelty in a Web3 credit scoring challenge, emphasizing MVP delivery, problem-driven consulting, multilingual AI learning products, and TTS for endangered languages

I Deleted My Second Brain (notes​.jim-nielsen​.com) . Jim Nielsen critiques second brain concepts, explores AI's impact on attention and reflection, discusses tech entrepreneurship, UI design, AI tools, web development, and media practices

👋 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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