What I've been thinking about — March 2026
Hi there,
Welcome to the first issue of this newsletter. I've been meaning to get this going for a while, and today felt like the right day to pull the trigger on sending something out.
Here's what's been on my mind lately.
AI agents are getting real
I've spent a lot of time over the past few months working with AI coding assistants — not just for autocomplete, but for actual end-to-end tasks. The thing that's surprised me most isn't the capability, it's the workflow shift. The question has changed from "can it do this?" to "how do I structure the work so it can do this well?"
The biggest unlock for me has been keeping context tight. Smaller, well-scoped tasks with clear inputs and outputs work dramatically better than "here's the whole codebase, fix everything." That's probably obvious in retrospect, but it took me a while to internalize it.
Infrastructure as code, actually
I've been doing a deep dive into CloudFormation for this site's infrastructure — API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, EventBridge, SQS. The thing I keep coming back to is that the writing of the template is the easy part. The hard part is the mental model: understanding the dependency graph, knowing which resources need to exist before others, and debugging the cryptic rollback messages when something goes wrong.
One trick that's helped: treat your CloudFormation templates like code. They get reviewed, they get commented, they don't drift from what's actually deployed.
A few links
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The Bitter Lesson — Rich Sutton's 2019 essay on how general methods that leverage computation always win in the long run. Still the most important thing I've read about AI.
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Writing for Developers — Good practical advice on structuring technical writing. I've been trying to apply this to my own posts.
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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism — I'm about halfway through. Dense but important.
That's it for this one. I'm planning to send these roughly monthly — no fixed schedule, just when I have something worth saying.
— Micah