When to stop work 🛑, fixing web dependencies 🛠, be a staff engineer 💼

Good leadership sometimes requires intervening and forcing team members to take a rest to prevent burnout. Prioritizing early rest is necessary ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Sign Up |Advertise|View Online TLDR  TLDR Dev 2026-01-16 🧑‍💻 Articles & Tutorials The Design & Implementation of Sprites (12 minute read) Sprites is a platform of Linux virtual machines. These Sprites offer instant creation (1-2 seconds), root access, 100GB of durable storage, and automatically sleep during inactivity. Their unique capabilities come from certain design decisions: eliminating user-facing container images, using S3-compatible object storage for persistent disks, and using an "inside-out orchestration" model where much of the management occurs within the VM itself. The Complete Guide to CLAUDE.md (8 minute read) CLAUDE.md files are markdown files that Claude automatically reads at the start of each coding session to understand project-specific instructions, conventions, and workflows. They need to be maintained over time to avoid repeating setup instructions in every conversation. Other features include importing other files with `@imports`, using modular rule files in `.claude/rules/` directories, and placing CLAUDE.md files in subdirectories for more complex project structures. 🧠 Opinions & Advice When the right call is to Stop the Work (6 minute read) Good leadership sometimes requires intervening and forcing team members to take a rest to prevent burnout. Prioritizing early rest is necessary for sustained performance and retaining talent. Web dependencies are broken. Can we fix them? (8 minute read) The web platform has a broken dependency management system that forces developers to use complex bundlers for basic tasks like importing libraries. Dependency management should be decoupled from bundling and be made a first-class feature of the web platform itself. How we built an AI-first culture at Ably (8 minute read) Ably built an AI-first culture through a company-wide mandate requiring all employees to explore AI's potential to improve their effectiveness. Its approach focused on three pillars: internal AI adoption across all teams, improving developer experience through AI tools, and AI product enhancement based on real customer needs. Using MCPs was a key breakthrough. 🚀 Launches & Tools AI code review with comments you'll actually implement (Sponsor) Unblocked is the AI code review that surfaces real issues and meaningful feedback instead of flooding your PRs with stylistic nitpicks and low-value comments. "Unblocked made me reconsider my AI fatigue. Finally, a tool that surfaces context only someone with a full view of the codebase could provide." - Senior developer, Clio Try now for free Puck (GitHub Repo) Puck is a modular, open-source visual editor for React apps. It supports custom drag-and-drop content experiences using existing React components. As a simple React component, Puck integrates seamlessly into any React environment. Gambit (GitHub Repo) Gambit is an agent harness framework for building LLM workflows by creating small, typed "decks" with clear inputs, outputs, and guardrails. It fixes brittle orchestration, untyped I/O, excessive context, and difficult debugging by allowing a mix of LLM and compute tasks with localized logic. 🎁 Miscellaneous Beyond Senior: Consider the staff path! (14 minute read) The Staff Software Engineer role is a "beyond terminal" level that involves a broader scope across multiple teams or deeper technical expertise. The various archetypes of it include Tech Lead, Architect, Solver, or a leader's Right Hand. Getting to this level typically involves leading impactful projects that address large business needs. How to think about Gas Town (9 minute read) Gas Town uses AI agents to autonomously complete software tasks from a bug tracker. While the underlying concept of AI-driven development is inevitable, the project intentionally uses "weird" terminology to filter for like-minded, experimental individuals. 8 lessons from tech leadership on scaling teams and AI (11 minute read) Most companies jump into AI without realizing their data is a mess, and developers are increasingly skeptical (only a third actually trust AI output now). ⚡ Quick Links Cursor CEO Built a Browser using AI, but Does It Really Work? (5 minute read) Cursor's CEO used hundreds of AI agents to build a web browser in a week, but the resulting software only "kind of" works and is far from production-ready. The Agentic AI Handbook: Production-Ready Patterns (26 minute read) This is a collection of 113 production-ready patterns derived from real-world systems for building and deploying reliable AI agents. Serving Markdown for AI Agents (3 minute read) Serving Markdown via GitHub Actions and Jekyll improves data ingestion over messy HTML. Requiem For Another Hellsite (5 minute read) Stack Overflow question volume collapsed from 250,000 monthly posts to 2009 levels by 2026, mostly due to AI. Love TLDR? Tell your friends and get rewards! Share your referral link below with friends to get free TLDR swag! https://refer.tldr.tech/ef788db7/3 Track your referrals here. Want to advertise in TLDR? 📰 If your company is interested in reaching an audience of web developers and engineering decision makers, you may want to advertise with us. Want to work at TLDR? 💼 Apply here, create your own role or send a friend's resume to jobs@tldr.tech and get $1k if we hire them! TLDR is one of Inc.'s Best Bootstrapped businesses of 2025. If you have any comments or feedback, just respond to this email! Thanks for reading, Priyam Mohanty, Jenny Xu & Ceora Ford Manage your subscriptions to our other newsletters on tech, startups, and programming. Or if TLDR Dev isn't for you, please unsubscribe.