🦸 Community Superhero

Our community superhero this week is Sooter Saalu, technical writer at Draft.dev. Sooter has written extensively for the Bacalhau project and gives wonderful conference talks on how AI is transforming technical writing. He also has a psychology background on top of the engineering chops, and it shows in how he thinks about cognitive load and developer onboarding. Thank you for the work you do, Sooter!

💯 Spotlight

Y’all know how I’m a sucker for formalizing development practices with AI. In 2026 alone, I think this newsletter has shared out half a dozen articles about where we’re at with building software that takes advantage of agents. It’s constantly changing, but strong foundations are emerging and schools of thought are converging for architectural pillars. Kai Waehner published an article last week on how he views modern data architecture as a trinity, balancing process intelligence, event-driven integration, and trusted agentic AI. He goes through what all of it means and how they play together, but I found the most value out of the graphics throughout the piece. It’s a great way to show how he’s approaching development these days and I’m (mostly) aligned with it.

🔥 My Favorite Content

Over the past year, tech content has been taken over by video (like it or not). We see lots of creators dabbling with videos, but it opens up a new set of problems - access to them. Sure you could go with YouTube, but if you’re building a hosted platform like Lee Gilmore, you have to think about entitlements and restricting access. Which is exactly what Lee has done and shared last week with his post on using CloudFront signed URLs to restrict access to files. I love how thorough the article is, but really appreciate Lee’s learning in public as he builds Study From Experts with Mark Sailes. Fantastic write-up, I learned a ton from this one.

I know I speak for myself when I say that AI has made me a little lazy. Apparently I’m not alone, because Teri Radichel posted an article last week on how to reduce token burn rate with a well-designed architecture. If I could oversimplify her article, it would be “don’t be lazy.” But in all seriousness, it’s a great reminder to not jump straight to AI with vague instructions. If things can be done deterministically through code, DO IT THROUGH CODE! We’re burning through AI budges at an alarming rate because honestly, it’s a little too easy to just ask. Give this a read, it’s important.

Here’s a good thought experiment to kickstart your week, shared by Sylwia Laskowska. If GenAI existed in 2011, would we still have the modern web? Now, we all know GenAI existed well before 2011, but Sylwia means if everything we had today existed back then. She argues that GenAI strengthens what we have but doesn’t really work with emerging technology. So if we were all vibe coding 15 years ago, would the internet be a bunch of optimized PHP? It’s a fun little argument with lots of interesting comments.

💡 Tip of the Week

I found Sandro Volpicella’s post on AWS mistakes costing you money insightful last week. All five he listed were ones I hadn’t seen before, which made the whole thing really refreshing.

🐣 New Releases

Reminder, all releases from AWS can be found on AWS News by Luc van Donkersgoed. Below are my favorite from last week.

Lambda functions can mount S3 buckets as file systems now, which should simplify a lot of operations where you’re using Lambda to modify long-lived files. This is a pretty neat update.

Amazon Aurora serverless just got up to 30% faster performance under the covers. Nothing to change in your apps, it’s just faster. Ah, the promise of serverless 🙂

Last Words

Sometime last year I stated I wasn’t going to share any articles that were clearly written/assisted by AI. As you might have noticed, I have gone back on that. The unfortunate truth these days is that if I didn’t include them, I’d have next to nothing to share with you every week. We’re in a time where there’s more content than ever, but it all reads the same. Yes there are unique ideas in some of them, and those often get shared here. But they all sound like they were written by the same person, with the same grammar and same vocabulary. This is my ask of you: please keep your voice. It’s more than ok to use AI to help you research or structure content. But try to avoid falling into the “sea of things that actually matter” as Claude or ChatGPT would put it.

That’s my take on the week, but what’s yours?

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