This week’s reading list explores the shifting paradigms of personal software development, the evolving dynamics of managing AI agents, and the frontier of ambient hardware. From the realization that managing agents is deeply adjacent to engineering management, to building custom tools without writing a line of code, these articles highlight how rapidly our relationship with computers is changing.

Managing agents requires the same skill set as managing human engineering teams

[blog] Understand to participate. Geoffrey Litt’s framing from the AIE World’s Fair on collaborating with coding agents is spot-on. He argues that we must understand the code to a depth that enables us to participate further with the model, avoiding taking on cognitive debt as our understanding drifts from the actual implementation. I think this is absolutely right, and it points to why people with management experience may actually excel in a fully agentic world—an idea I explored late last year in Unlocking AI Success: How Managerial Skills Can Help You. If you have managed an engineering team before, you already know that you cannot be deeply familiar with every single line of the codebase. Instead, you understand how to build a high-level conceptual model that lets you guide and make meaningful contributions through your employees—or, in this case, your agents.

Securing public-facing LLMs against prompt injection is becoming a practical science

[blog] What happened after 2,000 people tried to hack my AI assistant. Fernando Irarrázaval’s write-up on defending his AI assistant from prompt injection is a masterclass in practical security. As we move from isolated sandboxes to public-facing agentic workflows, the threat of prompt injection becomes a first-class engineering concern. It is incredibly encouraging to see this defensive engineering maturing into a rigorous, practical science with real-world data rather than just hypothetical panic.

We are entering a golden age of bespoke, personal software

[article] Claude redefined my bond with Macs. I am building my own apps and it’s a bliss.. This piece from Digital Trends is more evidence of the rapid onset of what I call the “personal software” era. The author, who doesn’t know how to code, describes building fully functional, offline menu bar utilities, image mockup editors, and custom word processors with Claude inside of a few hours. When the friction of translating intent to code drops to zero, we stop downloading generic software and start building bespoke tools tailored precisely to our quirks—a theme I wrote about in Building Personal Software: Crafting Your Own Tools for Success. It is a profound shift in how we interact with computers.

Tracking the relentless march of the AI goalposts over four years

[blog] It Still Can’t Do My Job: Four Years of Moving Goalposts (2022–2026). This is a delightful walk down memory lane, cataloging the shifting skepticism from the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 to the state of the art in 2026. It is highly entertaining to look back at the “goalpost graveyard” and see how quickly criticisms like “it can’t even write Snake” or “no real developer will use it” transitioned from conventional wisdom to historical footnotes. It’s a healthy reminder of just how fast the baseline is moving underneath us.

The physical interface of computing is shrinking to our fingers

[tool] Productivity, without the keyboard.. The Oasis smart ring is a fascinating look at the future of ambient input. By packing a touchpad and private voice input via a noise-isolating microphone into a ring, it aims to let you capture thoughts and interact with assistant systems without being glued to a keyboard or screen. As voice-to-text engines like Whisper become incredibly low-latency and accurate, the hardware we use to feed them is shifting from heavy screens to subtle, wearable devices.