This week's deepdive hit a nerve.
It's true: there are more and more signs that AI agents help increase *output* but they result in worse *quality.* Unless something changes. And something needs to change, clearly!
The deepdive: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/are-ai-age...
Full episode:
• YouTube: youtu.be/WjckELpzLOU
• Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/0bIu...
• Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/m...
• Summary and transcript: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/mitchell-h...
How Mitchell Hashimoto (creator of Ghostty, founder of HashiCorp) got good at using AI tools for coding + work:
"I was forcing myself to figure out how to prompt the agent to produce the same quality result as mine. Even though I was working much slower because it was more than double the work."
Steve Yegge on his 8 levels of "AI-proficiency" for software engineers:
From level 6, you're working with multiple agents, at level 7 you run agent orchestrators, and at 8, run factories.
On YouTube: youtu.be/aFsAOu2bgFk
Other platforms: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/from-ides-...
All main-stage talks from The Pragmatic Summit are out. Check them out:
- Data vs hype with AI (with Laura Tacho)
- How AI is reshaping software (with OpenAI)
- Building world-class engineering orgs (with GitHub's ex CEO and Atlassian's CTO)
Watch: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-future...
How do companies decide which AI coding tool and AI code review tool to use across the company? Today's deepdive goes into what 10 different companies - including Wealthsimple and WeTravel - did jus this.
This is how WeTravel did it:
Full: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/measuring-...
Craft Docs (a 5-year old startup) resisted the urge to jump on the AI bandwagon for the sake of it. They kept experimenting on the side instead.
In Jan, they went all in. Built custom tooling (+ open sourced it) and share exactly how they work. Full newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-first-m...
Happy Holidays!
In the final issue of the year, we look back on the year, with most-read articles, favorites, interesting podcast episodes, and trends across the tech industry for 2025.
Read it here: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pragma...
Interesting AI coding feature rolled out at Meta called "trajectories." On diffs, devs can see the prompts used to generate it (if it was AI-generated.) Rolled out to everyone.
Given more code is generated prompting: interesting experiment! Full: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-...
Today's deepdive is a rare behind-the-scenes on how AWS handles an outage. Details from October's outage from Senior Principal Engineer, Gavin McCullagh, who was part of the crew resolving this outage. Plus details on how incidents are handled at AWS: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-aws-de...
A new book by Nicole Forsgren and Abi Noda is out: Frictionless. We asked Nicole how this book relates to DORA and SPACE - frameworks on DevEx that she created. Her response:
More on writing the book, and two full chapters from Frictionless: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/frictionle...
It's that time of the year... code freezes / deployment freezes will start at lots of companies. A deepdive on approaches at Big Tech; the upsides; downsides; and companies that don't do this at all:
newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/code-freezes
The book 'Frictionless' by Nicole Forsgren and Abi Noda is out - read two full chapters and the story behind (re)writing this book in today"s issue:
newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/frictionle...
We talked with 40+ devs building MCP servers to figure out the on-the-ground realities of building and using MCP - the good and the bad)
Some surprising findings: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/mcp-deepdive
Impact-driven promotions almost always (eventually) lead to promotion-driven development. Little wonder it's so widespread throughout Big Tech and larger companies.
Full: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/preparing-...
The only newsletter I actually pay for. Highly recommend.
The Pragmatic Engineer Black Friday deal is live!
Get a year-long subscription for $120 (instead of $150). A sub gives you access to all deepdives, The Pulse, and resources for software engineers and eng managers. Available till Monday.
Get it here: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/0ea36188
45+ gift ideas and inspiration for the tech workers in your life (and maybe yourself) this holiday season:
newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/copy-holid...
What caused the AWS outage that felt like it took down half the internet on Monday?
It started with a race condition in DynamoDB's DNS propagation, which ended up setting the dynamod.us-east-1.amazonaws.com DNS to empty.
A deepdive and more details: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/aws-outage-u...
How does the Claude Code team build Claude code? Today's deepdive covers this.
An interesting take from them: "Mockups feel like a thing of the past when you can build 5-10 working prototypes per day."
The full article: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-claude...
How do tech companies measure the impact of AI on software dev? Here's how GitHub, Google, Dropbox, Microsoft, Monzo, Atlassian, Adyen, Booking and Grammarly do it:
More details on 9 other companies+trends in today's deepdive w @lauratacho.com at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-tech-c...
With the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) role trending in discussions, here's our deepdive from a month ago in @pragmaticengineer.com on the origins of the role, how it looks at Palantir, OpenAI and Ramp, and why the role is so hot *now*:
newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/forward-de...
State of the software engineering job market in 2025: Big Tech has started to hire more software engineers.
Also: tenure at Big Tech has dramatically increased since the 2023 layoffs (surprising!)
A lot more details in today's deepdive: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/state-of-t...
Interesting findings in The Pragmatic Engineer 2025 Survey:
- JIRA: the single-most mentioned tool.. mentioned more than any language/IDE/other
- Even though the survey was taken by developers, Figma is more used than Kubernetes or Cursor (!)
Full: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pragma...
How do you build a great SDK?
@quentin.pradet.me has been building and maintaining SDKs for a decade. In today's deepdive he walks through the most common approaches in the industry.
Surprise: LLMs not a great fit for this kind of work!
Full: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/building-g...
OpenAI's biggest-ever launch happened on 25 March: releasing ChatGPT Images.
100M new users in the first week
700M images generated in 7 days
1M new users/hour signing up at peek
The eng team told us how exactly they pulled it off. All the details: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/chatgpt-im...
What is it like to build humanoid robots, as a software engineer? Today's deepdive goes into the software side of this industry-but before we do, we need to talk about hardware. With Sandor Felber, formerly Humanoid Robot Learning Researcher at MIT:
newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/humanoid-r...
The Pragmatic Engineer crossed one million subscribers!
This is an improbable milestone. Today's deepdive covers the history behind it, who reads the publication, why it might be so popular, and what's next: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/one-million
Tech interviews feel like they are at inflection point: a lot of approaches and interview types that worked fine until now seem to be breaking down.
Could we be heading back to pre-pandemic hiring practices? Today's deepdive: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/tech-hirin...
What is the MCP Protocol, and why is it spreading so rapidly across IDEs, with all major ones having added support (Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code, Zed, Cline and Neovim)?
Today's deepdive goes into just this: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/mcp
