Reading list (29th March to April 20th)

#agents #ai #programming #resources

These are the current online posts that I enjoyed reading and made me think.

AI

Great video that provides an essential overview of how to build with AI (in this instance using Spring AI). Has a supporting Github repo at https://github.com/tzolov/voxxeddays2026-demo - link [tutorial] - ( Added: 2026-04-20 17:14:20 )
Agent harness or harness engineering is the new hotness right now, so this is a breakdown of all the components need to build an ai coding agent - link [opinion] - ( Added: 2026-04-20 10:34:17 )
A new tool that allows you to put controls on your AI agent spending - link [tool] - ( Added: 2026-04-20 10:32:30 )
A recent example of the challenges of relying too much on a single vendor - in this instance, Anthropic - who cut off an entire organisation (60 developers) - link [case study] - ( Added: 2026-04-20 08:45:22 )
Use Obsidan as a memory layer for Claude - this tool works at the repo level, helping you capture essential information that will persist over the lifetime of that project - link [tool] - ( Added: 2026-04-19 14:18:16 )
Another great doc on RAG done properly, this time exploring the science of chunks - link [best-practice] - ( Added: 2026-04-19 13:52:26 )
Sits between your apps and your models and provides various security features. - link [tool] - ( Added: 2026-04-19 10:17:46 )
Detailed breakdown of what a production RAG system would look like, with a great context builder architecture - link [best-practice] - ( Added: 2026-04-18 09:19:40 )
Good post on caching techniques you can apply to optimise your token/inference usage - link [best-practice] - ( Added: 2026-04-18 09:18:31 )
Nice blog post from the folks at PwC on observability in your generative AI systems - link [best-practice] - ( Added: 2026-04-12 19:04:06 )
Thread on Reddit around the observability gap with AI, and suggests that this is why AI project failure rates are so high - link [opinion] - ( Added: 2026-04-12 18:42:17 )
Decision making framework when architecting agentic apps - link [best-practice] - ( Added: 2026-04-11 22:49:40 )
Great primer video if you want to learn more about different AI agent patterns - link [best-practice] - ( Added: 2026-04-11 22:41:51 )
Harness engineering is so hot right now - a post from the wonderful folks at Thoughtworks, so you know its going to provide you with a good insight into exactly what this means. - link [opinion] - ( Added: 2026-04-11 21:44:38 )
A post that helps you think about and then select the right design pattern for your use case and situation - link [best-practice] - ( Added: 2026-04-11 21:43:19 )
Nice post with some ideas and thoughts on team structure and dynamics in the age of agentic AI - link [opinion] - ( Added: 2026-04-11 21:42:09 )
Run agents, lots of them, using this open source project - link [tool] - ( Added: 2026-04-11 07:42:11 )
A contrarian post on why we are falling for the AI hype - link [opinion] - ( Added: 2026-04-10 07:01:22 )
Production-grade engineering skills for AI coding agents from the OG himself. - link [code-repo] - ( Added: 2026-04-09 11:39:31 )
A post on how new agentic AI is changing engineering team structure and dynamics - link [opinion] - ( Added: 2026-04-09 11:37:54 )
In a world where architecture teams are either feared gatekeepers or invisible bystanders, Oliver brings together a brilliant panel to ask a genuinely awkward question: is your governance framework actually helping anyone? - link [opinion] - ( Added: 2026-04-09 11:26:49 )
A really cool way to run Playright - link [tool] - ( Added: 2026-04-04 09:04:17 )
New open source framework from Microsoft that looks at agentic AI governance and security - link [security] - ( Added: 2026-04-03 16:08:22 )
Good post from Mr Assay on AI and developer productivity - as always, the gold is in there those hyperlinks. - link [opinion] - ( Added: 2026-04-02 16:02:24 )
A must watch video about Blackhat LLMs from the clever folks at Anthropic - link [security] - ( Added: 2026-04-02 09:32:43 )
Mastra is a framework for building AI-powered applications and agents with a modern TypeScript stack. It includes everything you need to go from early prototypes to production-ready applications. Mastra integrates with frontend and backend frameworks like React, Next.js, and Node, or you can deploy it anywhere as a standalone server. It's the easiest way to build, tune, and scale reliable AI products. - link [tool] - ( Added: 2026-04-01 08:49:08 )
Nice post from the great folk at Nearform on how to build production grade agentic applications with the right testing approach - link [best-practice] - ( Added: 2026-04-01 08:36:59 )
Seems like a theme this week - folks writing about the gap of using agentic AI, and however good the output they generate, they do not understand what good looks like, how to evaluate quality, and understand how to make the right trade offs. - link [opinion] - ( Added: 2026-04-01 08:07:51 )
An interesting take on AI - the fact that Agents do not understand what "good" looks like, thats on you. - link [opinion] - ( Added: 2026-04-01 08:06:26 )
Great blog post on implementing controls when deploying production AI agents to help minimise regression and drive up consistency - link [best-practice] - ( Added: 2026-04-01 07:34:15 )
Portkey is a tool that helps provide AI governance and observability to your apps. Now open source - link [tool] - ( Added: 2026-04-01 07:30:49 )
An interesting pov on the difference in how execs and individual contributors (ICs) are viewing agentic AI - link [opinion] - ( Added: 2026-03-31 15:23:36 )
Understand AI coding harnesses by looking at the (disclosed) source code for Claude Code - check the README to understand the. backstory here - link [code-repo] - ( Added: 2026-03-31 14:47:51 )
Research paper that seems to indicate that creating personas within your agentic AI applications might be leading to suboptimal output - link [research] - ( Added: 2026-03-31 09:59:49 )
Some interesting insights from a study of students and how they are using LLMs in their studying. - link [case study] - ( Added: 2026-03-31 08:22:41 )
Enforce runtime guardrails through a centralized control layer—configure once and apply across all agents. Agent Control evaluates inputs and outputs against configurable rules to block prompt injections, PII leakage, and other risks without changing your agent’s code. - link [tool] - ( Added: 2026-03-31 08:12:52 )
Run multiple agents in parallel — each in its own container, with its own workspace, collaborating on your code or project files simultaneously. - link [tool] - ( Added: 2026-03-30 14:53:06 )
This repo provides info on how you can integrate Cedar policies into your MCP Servers - link [code-repo] - ( Added: 2026-03-30 12:00:13 )
The folks at JPC Morgan have put together this post that outlines how they are using agentic AI to help them with threat modelling - link [security] - ( Added: 2026-03-29 18:28:46 )
Dify is an open-source LLM app development platform. Its intuitive interface combines AI workflow, RAG pipeline, agent capabilities, model management, observability features (including Opik, Langfuse, and Arize Phoenix) and more, letting you quickly go from prototype to production. - link [tool] - ( Added: 2026-03-29 11:20:22 )
A collection of use cases with supporting assets from OpenAI - link [best-practice] - ( Added: 2026-03-28 21:19:14 )
Scion is an experimental multi-agent orchestration testbed designed to manage concurrent LLM-based agents running in containers across your local machine and remote clusters. It enables developers to run groups of specialized agents with isolated identities, credentials, and workspaces, allowing for a dynamic and evolving graph of parallel execution of tasks such as research, coding, auditing, and testing. - link [tool] - ( Added: 2026-03-28 12:50:21 )

CODING

A very nice interactive tool to help you understand some of the underpinning concepts of event driven, serverless application architectures - link [best-practice] - ( Added: 2026-04-20 17:07:39 )
Agentic AI coding tools roll out infigraphic - link [best-practice] - ( Added: 2026-04-19 13:39:04 )
A post that dives into whether token maxing is a signal of dev productivity or whether there are other data points that matter. Well worth your attention - link [best-practice] - ( Added: 2026-04-18 09:43:57 )
A collection of great Claude files, especially around the domain of TDD and testing - link [best-practice] - ( Added: 2026-04-13 09:03:00 )
Measuring AI in software development: Interview with Jellyfish CEO Andrew Lau - link [case study] - ( Added: 2026-04-09 11:38:26 )
Great overview of how Spotify do releases - if you want to nerd out on details, this is the post for you. Whilst the stuff in here is pretty standard, the way it is described is excellent so well worth your time. - link [best-practice] - ( Added: 2026-04-09 11:23:00 )
Data points on software engineering jobs - slowly increasing over the past two years, despite the increasing usage of AI coding assistants. - link [report] - ( Added: 2026-04-01 09:05:22 )
Nice blog post on some architecture patterns when implementing gitops - link [best-practice] - ( Added: 2026-03-31 10:00:45 )
A nice tool from my good friend Danilo that allows you to take a code repo and then generate a very cool interactive tool to help explain the code, line by line - link [tool] - ( Added: 2026-03-30 12:04:12 )
A nice tool that helps you reduce token use when exploring your code base in Claude - link [tool] - ( Added: 2026-03-28 08:31:33 )

TECH

Trends in enterprise customers in software engineering - link [opinion] - ( Added: 2026-04-10 16:49:04 )
The State of Agentic AI 2026 Report - link [report] - ( Added: 2026-04-09 11:36:28 )
If you want to learn Kubernetes and all things cloud native, this resource will help you get started - all local, so as long as you have a good broadband and decent spec machine (home lab) you should be good to go - link [code-repo] - ( Added: 2026-04-09 11:35:11 )
A HBR post that looks at how AI is reshaping security and risk. Whether you are using it or not, security and risk are being impacted and you need to think about what your plan is to tackle these new threats. - link [security] - ( Added: 2026-04-09 11:29:53 )
Really great post on how to approach the fragmentation problem when teams want to leverage different tools - link [best-practice] - ( Added: 2026-04-02 15:57:51 )
A blog post on why you should start a blog - provides some good reasons, and these defo ring true for me. - link [opinion] - ( Added: 2026-03-31 08:21:35 )