Book Cube
Books, ideas and engineering culture — every week
A Telegram channel with original notes and reviews on books about technology, architecture, management, economics and personal growth. Long-form posts with practical takeaways, no fluff, no ads.
Book Cube posts
Bilingual versions of channel posts, with sources and a link to the original Telegram publication.
- #DevEx
Anthropic: What Remains for Humans in a Company of Agents? Research Insights Made Simple #40 (#DevEx)
An announcement of a discussion of Anthropic’s research: outcomes, human attention, learning, and incentives.
- #AI4SDLC
Research Insights №38: What a Harness Contributes — Materials (#AI4SDLC)
Episode materials on experimentally evaluating agent planning, tools, and context management.
- #AI
How Work Is Changing Inside Anthropic (#AI)
Research on hiring, productivity, meta-work, and employee incentives, with the author’s PDF annotations.
- #AI4SDLC
Gautam Korlam: CI for a Stream of Agent Changes (#AI4SDLC)
CI capacity, repeated checks, independent review, and retaining the evidence behind merge decisions.
- #SelfDevelopment
Understand Before Deciding: How I Learn New Topics with AI (#SelfDevelopment)
A pmclub upskill week talk announcement about using AI to work with sources and decision criteria.
- #AI4SDLC
Giga Conf: What Should Happen to a Harness After a New Model? (#AI4SDLC)
A talk announcement about agent harness evolution and reassessing accumulated instructions.
- #AI4SDLC
Stack Overflow 2026 (#AI4SDLC)
An author’s reading of the Stack Overflow survey: trust in AI, tool popularity, and work context.
- #DevTools
Scion: Anthropic’s Git Replacement for Agent Development (#DevTools)
Research Insights №39 announcement on Scion’s architecture and guarantees between merge and deployment.
- #AI
3 AImigo S1E10: Agents with Payment Rights — Would We Trust AI with Our Money? (#AI)
A discussion announcement about shopping, payment protocols, budgets, and the limits of agent autonomy.
- #Engineering
The Pavel Golubev Livestream Is Starting
A short invitation to join the livestream as it starts.
- #AI4SDLC
Scion: When Agents Hit Development Infrastructure Limits (#AI4SDLC)
Scion’s architecture, migration from Git, server-side operations, and changing CI guarantees in Anthropic’s report.
- #AI
Stanford CME295, Lecture 2: What Changed Inside the Transformer (#AI)
MoE, RoPE, GQA, inference reproducibility, and guided decoding in Stanford’s second course lecture.
- #Engineering
Pavel Golubev FDE Livestream Rescheduled
A date correction for the conversation with Pavel Golubev about forward deployed engineers.
- #Data
AI and Data Platforms: Research Insights Made Simple №37 Materials (#Data)
A conversation with Nikolay Golov about data platform approaches, zero-ETL, and engineering trade-offs.
- #AI4SDLC
3 AImigo S1E9: Boundaries of Autonomy — Episode Materials (#AI4SDLC)
Materials from a discussion of agent delegation, approvals, and the full cost of an accepted task.
- #AI4SDLC
Live: What Does an Agent Harness Contribute?
An invitation to discuss a study of planning, tools, and context management for coding agents.
- #AI4SDLC
Factory: Engineers Become Managers — Who Can Still Check Their Agents’ Work? (#AI4SDLC)
Davis Palmie’s talk on software factories, environment readiness, and engineering judgment when managing agents.
- #Books
Harness Engineering: Familiar Ideas in One Book (#Books)
Nicole Koenigstein’s first two chapters: familiar ideas, task state, and questions about when harness components help.
- #AI4SDLC
Research Insights #36: Harnesses for Long-running Development (#AI4SDLC)
Episode materials on planners, generators, evaluators, and the limits of autonomous application development.
- #Data
AI and Data Platforms: Live with Nikolay Golov
An invitation to a conversation with Nikolay Golov about adding AI to data platforms.
- #AI4SDLC
Meet Pi: The Minimalist, Self-Modifying Coding Agent (#AI4SDLC)
Mario Zechner and Armin Ronacher on a small agent core, extensions, and control over the workflow.
- #AI4SDLC
Research Insights #35 materials: an environment for agents (#AI4SDLC)
Episode materials on OpenAI harness engineering: project knowledge, tools, architectural checks, and technical debt.
- #ForKids
Pasha and Dad (#ForKids)
A book about Pasha and his dad: family sketches, reading with Kirill, and a personal postscript.
- #Management
FDE: who is responsible for making AI work for the customer? (#Management)
The October 14 Code of Leadership livestream with Pavel Golubev: AI implementation, project boundaries, and FDE management.
- #AI4SDLC
Harness design for coding agents: what does the harness contribute? (#AI4SDLC)
An experimental comparison of planning, tools, and context management in coding agents.
- #Data
AI and the data platform: connecting AI to all an organization’s data (#Data)
The October 12 livestream with Nikolay Golov on operational data, analytics, Lakehouses, and agents.
- #Books
The Forward Deployed Engineer — Paden Gayle (#Books)
The first two chapters on FDE responsibility, stakeholder alignment, and the economics of implementation.
- #AI
YC Paper Club: what comes after LLM + GPU? (#AI)
Optical computing, neuromorphic chips, and living neurons: research bets and demonstration limits.
- #Books
The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann (#Books)
Reflections on John von Neumann’s biography: computing, game theory, physics, and self-reproducing machines.
- #AI4SDLC
Research Insights #34 materials: long-running agents and handoffs (#AI4SDLC)
Episode materials on session handoffs, completion criteria, and evaluating a harness.
- #AI4SDLC
Research Insights livestream: long-running application development
An invitation to a livestream on Anthropic’s March article about harnesses for long-running application development.
- #Personal
A charity auction: breakfast together
A breakfast meeting auction on Tolk in support of the Nit Dobra charity.
- #Management
Code of Leadership #84 materials: does a developer become a manager in the AI era? (#Management)
A conversation with Andrey Dmitriev about useful tasks, responsibility, and the agent lifecycle.
- #AI4SDLC
Harness design for long-running autonomous application development (#AI4SDLC)
Anthropic’s Planner, Generator, and Evaluator: acceptance, cost, and simplification as models improve.
- #AI4SDLC
Research Insights #33 materials: SWE-agent (#AI4SDLC)
Episode materials on how tools, interfaces, and feedback change an agent’s results.
- #AI4SDLC
Justin Reock: code is easier to change, harder to release confidently (#AI4SDLC)
DX observations on maintainability, change confidence, and PR growth; what to verify after adopting AI.
- #Leadership
Why a manager returns to code — episode materials (Series #Leadership)
Materials for Code of Leadership #82 with Nikita Belokopytov: returning to code, management skills, and the limits of agent autonomy.
- #AI4SDLC
Harness engineering: how an experimental team at OpenAI reorganized development around agents for an internal product (Series #AI4SDLC)
OpenAI’s experience with repository knowledge, verifiable architecture, agent tools, and Symphony. An invitation to Research Insights #35.
- #AI4SDLC
Research Insights #34: handing work over between agent sessions
An invitation to Research Insights #34 on handing work over between sessions of the same agent, based on Anthropic’s article.
- #AI4SDLC
Warp: you corrected the agent. What did the system learn? (Series #AI4SDLC)
How Warp proposes turning engineers’ corrections into skill updates, and why those instructions also need verification.
- #AI4SDLC
Anthropic’s agent harness: handing work over between coding sessions (Series #AI4SDLC)
Handing work over between agent sessions: logs, Git, requirements, and verified state. An Anthropic article discussion with an annotated PDF.
- #AI4SDLC
Developers are becoming managers: a livestream with Andrey Dmitriev
An invitation to a livestream with Andrey Dmitriev from JUG.RU on why developers are becoming managers.
- #AI4SDLC
Conductor: how to conduct an orchestra of agents (Series #AI4SDLC)
Charlie Holtz on managing multiple agents, mandatory human review, team knowledge, and the cost of switching attention.
- #Leadership
Episode materials: how an engineer learns to negotiate — Sergey Kiselev (Series #Leadership)
Materials for Code of Leadership #83: platform development through collaboration, team autonomy, hiring, and incident follow-up.
- #AI4SDLC
SWE-agent: how an interface helps a model work with code (Series #AI4SDLC)
SWE-agent and its ACI: SWE-bench Lite results, the cost of constraints, and the move to mini-swe-agent. Includes an annotated PDF.
- #AI4SDLC
SWE-agent: how the interface changes the result / Research Insights Made Simple #33 (Series #AI4SDLC)
A livestream on SWE-agent: code search and editing, feedback, context management, and the results of the 2024 experiments.
- #AI4SDLC
Factory and HumanLayer: how much autonomy should agents have? (Series #AI4SDLC)
How Factory and HumanLayer approach agent autonomy, delivery costs, code review, and team readiness.
- #AI
One designer and hundreds of assets (Category #AI)
What caught my attention in Vincent Wendy's talk about AI Engineer was the designer's willingness to change his processes and build his own tools when the workload becomes too large to handle manually.
- #AI4SDLC
3 AImigo S1E8: AI-native companies — episode materials (Category #AI4SDLC)
Recordings, audio editions, an edited recap, and a longread accompanying the conversation with Aleksey Litvinov and Evgeny Sergeev about people and agents, process redesign, and automation economics.
- Books
While preparing to move, I started sorting through my books and clearing out my library.
A brief recommendation of Scott Page’s “The Model Thinker” and a recollection of his Coursera course, which started the author’s enthusiasm for online learning.
Why subscribe
- 01Get notes on key books with practical takeaways and links to the originals
- 02See how the same idea echoes across engineering, management and economics
- 03Be the first to hear about new talks, articles and podcast episodes
- 04Keep a ready-to-use list of recommendations: 'what should I read on X'
How the channel works
Deep reviews
Reviews of books, research, and talks: key ideas, context, practical conclusions, and a personal perspective.
Topic tags
Posts are tagged: #Engineering, #Management, #AI, #Economics, #Software, #Leadership and more — easy to find everything on a topic.
Announcements & threads
New talks, tellmeabout.tech articles and Code of Leadership episodes are announced here too. One feed for everything.
Channel sections
Real tags from recent months — frequency reflects the channel's focus: tech, AI and management at the center, but not only.
Post genres
What you'll actually see in the feed.
Engineering book review
From 'Designing Data-Intensive Applications' to fresh AI engineering whitepapers — with a take on what's useful and for whom.
Talk announcement
When a new conference talk comes out — recording, slides, references and a short recap land here.
Practice note
Short observations and ideas: how we build architecture, how culture changes, what works in large orgs.
Whitepapers & research
Reviews of DORA, DevEx, AI4SDLC and other studies — with focus on what's actually applicable.
Who it's for
- Engineers who want depth, not summaries of summaries
- Team leads and managers looking for books in their growth zone
- CTOs and founders holding both the tech and the business context
- Anyone who prefers long, thoughtful posts over a news feed
Subscribe
One post every few days, zero ads, thousands of readers as of May 2026 — join if you learn through books.
Open Book Cube