As many of you know, at the end of 2023 my youngest brother, Evan, came home from Michigan State and was tired, achy and not finishing favorite meals. He seemed run down and we all assumed it was post-finals recovery and the stress of wrapping up his college career. When it continued through Christmas, we got him into our family doc and on January 4th (two days after his 22nd birthday) she called and told us to get him to the ER as soon as possible. His blood test revealed acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). Over two years later, many beyond-belief difficult treatments, months in the hospital (thank you UofM/CS Mott!), a bone marrow transplant, and thousands of prayers by family, friends and people we’ve never met, he’s graduated from Michigan State, started a great job and moving on just being a normal 24-year-old young man. We’re thankful for every moment together, and for what we’ve learned and gained through this ordeal. And we’re thankful for everyone that helped him and us to survive. Community is more than just group activities and people with shared interests. It really is the love, kindness and care we share with each other, particularly when times are tough. It’s overwhelming to think of how blessed we are and how thankful we are for our community. I am honored to have joined the Executive Committee for Blood Cancer United’s Light The Night campaign, and I am asking for your support. In honor of Evan and other cancer fighters, I am aiming to raise $10,000 to support patients and families facing blood cancer while funding lifesaving research. Every donation, big or small, makes a difference and brings hope to those who need it most. My wife Audrey and I are going to match up to $6,000 of donations to Blood Cancer United, and we can't thank you all enough for joining us in this fight against cancer. pages.lls.org/ltn/mi/detroit…

One of the biggest mistakes engineers make is making individual technical output their only goal

Engineering leadership is one of the few jobs where the work is invisible for years and then obvious all at once. Every standard you let slide in your first year shows up as a significant problem in your third. The org in three years is decided by what you tolerate this week.

Two weeks until Light The Night Detroit. Let’s turn $6,000 into $12,000! My brother, Evan, is a blood cancer survivor. For my family, and many others, this cause is personal. Watching him face cancer showed me how much a diagnosis changes life for the entire family, and how much support matters. It’s why I’m proud to support Light The Night and Blood Cancer United, especially during September, both Blood Cancer Awareness Month and Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. As an Executive Challenger, I’m matching every dollar donated, up to $6,000 total. Every dollar raised helps Blood Cancer United provide critical support services, advance lifesaving research, and bring hope to those facing a blood cancer diagnosis. With my matching gift in place, your donation can go twice as far. Please consider making a gift, sharing my fundraising page with your network, or registering to join me and my family on September 24th at The Corner Ballpark for Light The Night Detroit. Thank you for helping bring light, hope, and support to patients and families in our community! pages.lls.org/ltn/mi/Detroit…

FOMO is the result of a lack of vision and belief

One of the best decisions I made in my career was to spend the last few years in leadership positions, building teams, orgs, charters, and visions. The carryover into agentic engineering is absurdly high.

Toddler tantrums before the first cup of coffee are hard

We're removing brain tumors, developing individualized cancer vaccines, solving the climate crisis, generating precipitation in Alaska, and developing transformational robotics, and you are really dooming? There is no better time to be alive.

The variety of bugs across harnesses is frustrating and representative of the times: - Grok registers MCP tools with double underscores as a namespace delimiter, so any tool with natural double underscores fails to register - Codex doesn't care about tool refreshing for MCP clients, so tools remain unavailable post-auth With things moving incredibly fast there are more sharp edges than ever before

Thank you to everyone who has donated! We've raised almost $2,000 at this point, 20% of the way to our goal of $10k Each donation, no matter the size, is so greatly appreciated and works towards helping people like Evan find care and community.

Cursor is undeniably the best harness at this point. The intelligent routing, the configurability, remote/mobile app usage, and even PR integrations are next level. It's the only harness where I feel like I am significantly accelerated without missing any relevant code context.

Cursor is in the war of: "one stop shop to run your software business", and they could be positioned the strongest given both their data and harness. I've been bullish on them for a long time now, and their momentum is not slowing down!

I'm frequently hearing how burnt out many of my peers are, especially working at large companies where the good engineers are taking on 10x more work and the bad engineers are doing 10x less. Code review is where that transfer is happening gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/

It's kind of absurd how far behind Claude Dispatch feels behind Cursor Mobile and Codex Remote. It's an unusable experience at this point

Well said, @ianmst ianmccrystal.com/posts/notes…

Modern day software development is a miracle 10+ years ago, I worked at Union Pacific building simulation software. We would write C# and then port it over to the corner "build machine" (which was just a windows desktop with the sole responsibility of running a 13h build process). We would then take the results of that build process, manually port it onto 2000lb apparatuses that we built in the room next to us, and ship them off on semi trucks. When the build machine hung, or failed, we would only discover when whichever one of us shmucks was designated to babysit the build would see the errors, we would hot patch via SVN, and then restart the build Nowadays, I have agents that build, test, and patch software, directly SSH'd into a windows laptop perpetually running in my office. There's never been a better time to be building software!

MCP stateless spec went final. Going stateless at the protocol layer will unlock so much acceleration/functionality. With every call carrying its own context, it makes agents much easier to scale and reason about. This also means your authZ decisions must travel with the request instead of living in some session you assumed was safe (which is great!)