Question best practices, 2025's AI breakthroughs, and RSC cutting load times by 70%. Plus how AI is moving engineering bottlenecks to infrastructure and a C++ bug that made both error and success flags true simultaneously.

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Welcome, Developers! đź‘‹

Today's edition covers engineering practices worth reconsidering, 2025's AI developments from reasoning models to $1bn coding agents, and React Server Components' performance trade-offs. Plus how LLMs are shifting engineering work from implementation to infrastructure, and a cautionary tale about C++'s silent undefined behavior creating "impossible" payment bugs.

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đź”– The Reading Room

Articles we have hand-picked for you:

5 Engineering Dogmas It's Time to Retire

Five widely-accepted software practices might be holding your team back. From mandatory code reviews slowing development to sprint cycles draining joy from building software, these "best practices" deserve scrutiny. What works for one team may not work for yours, and blindly following industry dogmas can create more problems than they solve.

By Anton Zaides →

2025: The year in LLMs

2025 saw the rise of "reasoning" models with inference scaling, the breakthrough success of coding agents like Claude Code (reaching $1bn run-rate), and Chinese open-weight models dominating leaderboards. The year also saw $200/month subscription tiers, prompt-driven image editing going viral, and OpenAI losing its undisputed lead as competitors caught up across capabilities.

By Simon Willison →

Performance of React Server Components

React Server Components slashed LCP from 4.1s to 1.28s in real-world testing, but only when data fetching is involved. It enables async server rendering that streams content progressively, merging benefits of SSR with client-side flexibility. However, the performance gains come at the cost of complete app re-architecture and vendor lock-in.

By Nadia Makarevich →

Software Engineering in 2026

LLM tools have dramatically reduced the cost of producing code, but engineering bottlenecks are moving elsewhere. As AI handles more implementation work, infrastructure abstractions, CI quality, and human-guided system design become the high-leverage areas. The mechanization of software development is accelerating, requiring engineers to reskill and rethink where they add value.

By Ben Congdon →

The Production Bug That Made Me Care About Undefined Behavior

A payment processing system handling billions of euros experienced an "impossible" bug where both error and success flags were true simultaneously. The culprit was C++'s default initialization rules, which silently left boolean fields uninitialized despite looking like safe code. The fix required understanding the subtle difference between POD and non-POD types, where the compiler generates constructors that don't initialize primitive fields.

By Philippe Gaultier →

⏳ Back in Time

Most clicks from last newsletter:

đź”— The Link Lounge 

Unordered finds from around the web:

Find something cool? You can send us links to feature here via email.

🧰 The Toolbox

Tools and products we're excited about today:

zpdf 

zpdf is a high-performance, open-source PDF text extraction library written in Zig featuring memory-mapped zero-copy parsing, SIMD acceleration, and structure tree support. Benchmarks demonstrate 1.8x to 6.3x speedup over MuPDF.

Learn more →

pg-aiguide

pg-aiguide helps AI coding tools write better PostgreSQL code through semantic search across version-aware documentation, curated best practice skills, and TimescaleDB extension support, available as an open-source MCP server or Claude Code plugin under Apache 2.0 license.

Learn more →

RSC Explorer 

RSC Explorer interactively visualizes the React Server Components protocol. It shows how components serialize and stream across networks, featuring examples of async components, server actions, and routing mechanics.

Learn more →

Claude in Chrome

Claude launched a Chrome extension that allows the AI assistant to navigate, click buttons, and fill forms directly in your browser. Available in beta to all paid subscribers, it integrates with Claude Code and Claude Desktop to connect development workflows and enable automated testing and iteration.

Learn more →

Stop Getting Blocked. Start Scraping.  

Built a scraper that keeps getting blocked by Cloudflare? You're not alone.


Evomi's Scraper API auto-bypasses Cloudflare, DataDome, and PerimeterX—plus solves CAPTCHAs and renders JavaScript automatically. One API call replaces your entire scraping infrastructure. Integrates seamlessly with n8n for workflow automation. 99.9% uptime, <200ms latency, and 70% cheaper than alternatives at just $0.14/1K requests.


Try it free with 250,000 requests. No credit card needed. Swiss-made, EWDCI certified, trusted by data teams worldwide.

Start Free Trial

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