🦸 Community Superhero
Our community superhero this week is Ola Hungerford, Principal Engineer at Nordstrom and maintainer/community lead for the Model Context Protocol. Ola is one of the engineers making sure MCP itself doesn’t fall apart under the weight of its own success. She moderates the contributors Discord, facilitates spec decisions across thousands of community members, and writes some of the clearest technical breakdowns on how MCP works in practice. On top of all that, she performs and records original music as Dandelion Gold. Thank you for everything you do and for being such an inspiration, Ola!
💯 Spotlight
The other day my friend demoed a side project to me that I loved. I told him he did a great job, to which he responded “don’t praise me, it was Claude Code.” To which I responded, “well, that’s coding in 2026.” I was kinda joking, but mostly not. For better or for worse, agentic coding is here and has changed everything. So much so, that we might have a new classification of software: the Winchester Mystery House. In a spot-on post last week, Drew Breunig astutely points out that agents are pushing 1,000 lines of code per commit, leading to sprawling tools that only agents can read and maintain. In his post, Drew talks about the problems when writing code is this cheap, but leaves us with hope that we’re not in for disaster as time goes on. Great read.
🔥 My Favorite Content
In a “similar but different” piece to our spotlight, Ran Isenberg gave us his thoughts on AI-generated code in a dose of realism he calls “AI made everyone a builder and that’s a problem.” It covers some of the same things as the Winchester House article, but there are other statements in Ran’s article I really appreciate. Like how all of a sudden we’re defaulting to “build mode” when there are perfectly viable free solutions out there to many of the problems we’re trying to solve. My major take away from this post is to stop throwing caution to the wind with software, and continue to do your due diligence with it, even though it’s easier than it has ever been.
By now you’ve probably seen the announcement for S3 Files, which makes S3 buckets accessible as a file system. This is a really exciting launch, as many of us have tried to make S3 behave like a file system for years. I really like Corey Quinn’s take on the launch, where he firmly stands by S3 is not a filesystem, but not there’s one in front of it. His article is extremely well-written, providing a healthy balance of educated research and sarcasm (in typical, well-appreciated fashion). Reading through it, you get a thumbs up from Corey, which is no small feat in itself. Definitely worth the read before you try it yourself.
I’m 90% sure Jimmy Dahlqvist and I have a brain link. Over the past several years he and I somehow manage to build roughly the same things at roughly the same time - or at least converge on the same architectural patterns. Which is exactly what happened last week with his post on building a registration page with MongoDB. Like many of us serverless developers, Jimmy started his project with DynamoDB, but quickly ran into issues with too many GSIs and varying access patterns. So he hopped back over to the relational database world and breezed through the project. I like this article because it compares the NoSQL model to the relational model and tangibly demonstrates how much easier it is to solve his problem. I’ve been doing the same thing in my projects recently, and it makes a big difference for maintainability.
A couple of weeks ago, we got this amazing breakdown of DSQL from Darryl Ruggles. Luckily for us, he didn’t stop there. Last week, Darryl published an in-depth guide to Lambda Managed Instances with Terraform. He goes over everything there is to know with Lambda Managed Instances, even comparing it to “standard” Lambda, when to use one over the other, and the nuance of concurrency in this paradigm. I really like the quality and thoroughness in Darryl’s content recently. Honestly I’ve been finding myself referencing these posts over the AWS documentation. Wonderful work, Darryl!
💡 Tip of the Week
I gave a tiny peek behind the curtain last week into the software behind this newsletter. It’s not much more than a few screenshots and me talking about features, but I’m really proud of what it has turned into. It’s my most involved and evolved single-person project, and everything I do to enhance it is to bring y’all better content. Let me know if you’d want to see me do a talk on everything it does (or if you’d want to use the software for your own newsletter if I go that route).
🐣 New Releases
Reminder, all releases from AWS can be found on AWS News by Luc van Donkersgoed. Below are my favorite from last week.
AWS launched Agent Registry in preview last week, which gives you a private catalog for agents, tools, skills, MCP serves, and custom resources. So no public agent registry yet, but this is a huge step in the right direction!
Amazon Bedrock now supports cost allocation by IAM user and role, giving you insights into who is running up that bill or which agents are most expensive. Great way to track down cost optimizations.
Last Words
As the tech industry settles into life with agentic coding, I’m curious how you’re feeling about it. We obviously see a wide range of emotions and attitudes toward it and I’d like to know where you fall. Have you been holding out on it or are you at the point where you couldn’t see yourself writing code without it? Maybe somewhere in the middle? Let me know!
What did I miss? What made you nod along (or 🙄)? Hit reply if you’re reading the email. Prefer socials? Ping me on Twitter, LinkedIn, or email.
Happy coding!
Allen