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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.

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Bilingual versions of channel posts, with sources and a link to the original Telegram publication.

  1. #AI

    Bill Gates changes the tone of the AI conversation: this time is different (Rubric #AI)

    In April 2023, I [examined](https://t.me/book_cube/1008) Bill Gates’s essay “The Age of AI Has Begun.” His position then was measured: the risks were real but manageable, and AI’s benefits should ultimately outweigh them. The story now has an important second act.

  2. #AI4SDLC

    Episode materials with Anton Kosterin: how do you close the AI-native SDLC loop? (Rubric #AI4SDLC)

    The [materials](https://polomodov.tech/research-insights/ai-native-sdlc-playbook/) for episode 29 of Research Insights Made Simple, held on August 27, are ready. Anton Kosterin and I examined Anthropic’s [The AI-Native SDLC Playbook](https://claude.com/blog/the-ai-native-sdlc-playbook): what has to change around coding before agent speed can become delivery speed.

  3. #Robotics

    Sergey Levine: why acrobatic tricks are a poor test for a robot (Rubric #Robotics)

    In May, I started the [robotics series](https://t.me/book_cube/4564) by asking where real engineering progress ends and a well-produced demo begins. Sergey Levine’s [interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OSbaPjv0Rc), published on August 24, 2026, offers a useful test: a spectacular backflip can reveal less about the future of robots than mundane work with an unfamiliar cup in a new room.

  4. #AI

    McKinsey State of AI 2026: scaling is rising, but the EBIT effect is not (Rubric #AI)

    On August 25, McKinsey published its new [State of AI 2026](https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai), aptly subtitled “On the road to ROI.” Giving people access to an AI tool is no longer enough: organizations now have to prove that local acceleration can survive the journey through workflows, budgets, and the P&L.

  5. #BookCube

    Join us in 5 minutes to discuss August’s news in an experimental 3 AImigo stream

    Join us in 5 minutes to discuss the news from August: 3 AImigo is hosting an [experimental stream](https://www.youtube.com/live/FnrpaV9pjK8) about the month’s most interesting stories.

  6. #Management

    Dominika Rogala on burnout: AI speeds up work — and raises the expected workload (Rubric #Management)

    A [post](https://t.me/book_cube/4613) about AI burnout explored the limits of human attention. Dominika Rogala [adds](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJGKH45w4Q8) an organizational layer: AI can make a task cheaper while overloading the work system. The tools got faster — and so did expectations.

  7. #AI4SDLC

    I’m looking for someone to take over AI4SDLC after me (Rubric #AI4SDLC)

    I leave T-Bank on August 31, but the AI4SDLC mission remains: transform development processes and move the company toward AI Native. I’m looking for someone with hands-on experience, strong stakeholder skills, and the ambition to carry that work forward.

  8. #AI4SDLC

    Research Insights Made Simple #29: The AI-Native SDLC Playbook with Anton Kosterin (Rubric #AI4SDLC)

    Research Insights Made Simple starts in 5 minutes: Anton Kosterin and I will discuss Anthropic’s AI-Native SDLC Playbook and how to redesign the whole delivery lifecycle, not just code generation, around agents.

  9. #AI

    3 AImigo S1E3: August AI news digest (Rubric #AI)

    An announcement for the final 3 AImigo stream of August: a new monthly-news format that separates consequential changes for engineers and companies from marketing noise.

  10. #Architecture

    Bassem Dghaidi: “Simple is complicated enough” — system design without overengineering theater (Rubric #Architecture)

    A review of Bassem Dghaidi’s Beyond Coding conversation: why architecture should grow only to the next order of magnitude, how to express technical decisions in business terms, and what engineering work remains when agents write most of the code.

  11. #Management

    Episode materials with Sergey Berezhnoy: what remains scarce when code becomes cheap? (Rubric #Management)

    Materials from Code of Leadership S2E14 with Sergey Berezhnoy: how BEM grew into an ecosystem, how Staff+ leaders drive cross-cutting change, why AI creates systemic gains only after workflow redesign, and which forms of judgment and accountability remain scarce.

  12. #AI4SDLC

    Research Insights Made Simple #29: The AI-Native SDLC Playbook with Anton Kosterin (Rubric #AI4SDLC)

    An announcement for the August 27 live discussion with Anton Kosterin on Anthropic’s AI-Native SDLC Playbook: where the bottleneck moves after Build accelerates, how versioned artifacts and evals close the loop, and which ideas transfer to regulated engineering organizations.

  13. #AI4SDLC

    Why a successful AI product POC (proof of concept) is still not production-ready (Rubric #AI4SDLC)

    A look at Christopher Lovejoy and Saul Howard’s AI Engineer World’s Fair talk on why a convincing AI proof of concept is only the beginning: production requires an auditable event history, explicit data boundaries, human handoffs, and evaluation inside the customer’s environment.

  14. #Data

    Materials from the ‘Data Platform in 2026’ episode (#Data)

    Materials from episode 28 of Research Insights Made Simple, released on 24 August, are ready. Together with Nikolay Golov and Alexander Filatov of Tengri Data, we went from the boundary between OLTP and OLAP to permissions, isolation, and validation of AI-agent queries.

  15. #Management

    A CTO's first 90 days begin before the first day on the job—Management 360 (#Management)

    There is a strange tradition in tech: first you get a new role, and only then do you start figuring out what job you actually agreed to do. For a CTO, that is a particularly expensive way to discover the role. So on 3 September at 19:35, I will [speak](https://stratoplan-school.com/360/alexp/) at Stratoplan's Management 360 about a CTO's first 90 days. I will begin with a small inversion: the first day on the job is already the midpoint of the transition.

  16. #AI4SDLC

    Materials from the AMA with Book Cube subscribers (#AI4SDLC)

    Materials from the AMA session held on 23 August are ready. There were many questions, so in an hour and a half we covered everything from choosing the next book to taking responsibility for an autonomous AI agent's actions. We discussed:

  17. #AI4SDLC

    Harness Engineering Is Not Enough: Why Software Factories Fail (#AI4SDLC)

    Dex Horthy is an excellent speaker, and I watched his [latest talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib5GBkD555M). Previously, the HumanLayer co-founder advocated context engineering and the `Research → Plan → Implement` loop in [No Vibes Allowed](https://t.me/book_cube/4110). My [The New SDLC](https://t.me/book_cube/4628) review gave us `Agent = Model + Harness`. In this new 19-minute keynote, Dex adds an important qualification: a good harness improves execution, but cannot by itself preserve architectural quality over time.

  18. #CodeOfLeadership

    A live stream with Sergey Berezhnoy from Yandex starts in a couple of minutes.

    A [live stream](https://www.youtube.com/live/tyLuNZzmN7I) with Sergey Berezhnoy from Yandex starts in a couple of minutes.

  19. #Data

    Research Insights Made Simple #28: the data platform in 2026—from DWH to Lakehouse and AI agents (#Data)

    I almost forgot that today at 16:00 there will be a [live stream](https://www.youtube.com/live/pyGg03SlxBA?si=1RP7dsjanOUTNv2O) about data platforms. It continues the topic of the [sixth episode](https://t.me/book_cube/2874) of Research Insights Made Simple, where Nikolay Golov and I explored how to build data platforms in 2025. In episode 28, we return with a harder question: what happens when a neat storage, compute, catalog, and orchestration design meets legacy systems, migration costs, and real analytics workloads?

  20. #AI

    Omer Primor on CaaS: where renting context stops making sense (#AI)

    For an agent, context comes with some uncomfortable economics. When a question is a one-off, AI search looks like an ordinary API: ask, get an answer, move on. But if you check the same companies, vacancies, and prices every day, the meter starts again—even when nothing has changed. At some point, we are no longer renting an answer. We are renting the system's ability to remember.

  21. #AI

    Materials from the second episode of the "3 AImigo" podcast (#AI)

    Our second episode about the current state of AI-assisted development turned out to be an interesting one. We examined a paradox that teams encounter more and more often: AI makes an individual engineer noticeably faster and produces more code, yet roughly the same number of changes reach users. Local speed is not the same as an accepted result—and company size offers no protection from this gap.

  22. #BookCube

    The live stream has started—if you were planning to drop in, now is the time to join.

    The [live stream](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6XdLkQII40) has started—if you were planning to drop in, now is the time to join. If you prefer VK, there is now a [live stream](https://vkvideo.ru/live-228790766_456239133) there as well.

  23. #SelfDevelopment

    Code of Leadership S2E13: AMA with subscribers: reading, careers, side projects, and AI development (#SelfDevelopment)

    You sent in so many good questions that the comments became the program for a standalone live stream.

  24. #Books

    Crafting Engineering Strategy — Will Larson (#Books)

    I write about Will Larson's books regularly, and there is now a whole series of posts: [Staff Engineer](https://t.me/book_cube/783) on influence without a management title, [An Elegant Puzzle](https://t.me/book_cube/923) on the engineering organization as a system, and [The Engineering Executive's Primer](https://t.me/book_cube/2746) on the work of a technology executive. His fourth book, Crafting Engineering Strategy, connects these levels through one question: how do you make difficult decisions and carry them through an organization?

  25. #AI4SDLC

    Materials on building your own management system with Mikhail Tyurganov (#AI4SDLC)

    At the beginning of the week, Misha and I discussed his career journey and how the CTO role changes when a small team grows into an organization of thousands. What should you do when the methods that used to work become a constraint themselves? All the materials from that live stream are now ready.

  26. #AI

    llm-d: How KV Cache Became Cluster-Wide State (#AI)

    Architectural ideas can have two birthdays: a paper shows a technique works; later, someone makes it deployable and operable. This PyTorch Conference 2025 [talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfXIe_S53vA) by Google’s Cong Liu and Maroon Ayoub, then at IBM Research, is about the second. llm-d did not invent Prefill/Decode disaggregation; it turns a research pattern into an operable production stack. [Slides](https://hosted-files.sched.co/pytorchconference/84/Serving%20PyTorch%20LLMs%20at%20Scale_%20Disaggregated%20inference%20with%20Kubernetes%20and%20llm-d.pdf).

  27. #BookCube

    I was thinking we should hold an ask-me-anything session tomorrow.

    I was thinking we should hold an ask-me-anything session tomorrow. If you would like to ask me something, post your questions here, and tomorrow evening I will answer them live. If we get enough questions, the stream will happen.

  28. #AI4SDLC

    Danila Shtan: AI Does Not Replace Fundamentals or Engineering Accountability (#AI4SDLC)

    I watched a Beyond Coding [episode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTenuG5b4Eo) with Nebius CTO Danila Shtan. The title promises a discussion of the skills that get engineers hired, but I found the conversation broader: hiring, engineering organization, and trust in AI-assisted code all converge on one principle—autonomy does not remove control; it moves control closer to whoever makes the decision and owns the consequences.

  29. #BookCube

    The Live Stream with Sergey Berezhnoy from Yandex Has Been Postponed for Technical Reasons :(

    The [live stream](https://www.youtube.com/live/tyLuNZzmN7I) with Sergey Berezhnoy from Yandex that was supposed to be happening now will not take place this Friday after all: it has been postponed for technical reasons :( I hope we can hold it next week. Over the weekend, I will try to run some bonus streams about the longreads I have written recently.

  30. #AI4SDLC

    State of AI4SDLC, or How AI Is Reshaping Software Development—My DotNext Talk This Year (#AI4SDLC)

    DotNext in Moscow on September 25 will probably be my last conference in Russia before I move to London. I will give a [keynote](https://dotnext.ru/talks/20011109-state-of-ai4sdlc-or-how-the-development-industry-is-changing-under-the-influence-of-ai/) on the state of AI4SDLC, combining research, my own journey with AI4SDLC in big tech, thoughts on how these tools affect productivity, and forecasts for what comes next.

  31. #AI

    3 AImigo S1E2: AI Writes More Code. Why Isn’t Delivery Getting Faster? (#AI)

    Starting in five minutes, at [12:00 Moscow time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIbGDZ6gq5g), we are going live with `3 AImigo` to examine a paradox that teams encounter more and more often: AI makes an individual engineer noticeably faster and produces more code, yet roughly the same number of changes reach users. Local speed is not the same as an accepted outcome, regardless of company size.

  32. #Culture

    Flowers for Algernon at Chisto Teatr Intact (#Culture)

    Yesterday Nastya and I saw “Flowers for Algernon,” and it was excellent. Three actors brought every character to life on a stage furnished only with blocks, walls, and a door. The director found a convincing way to combine live performance with the novel’s diary structure, letting us follow the full arc of Charlie Gordon’s story.

  33. #AI4SDLC

    Evolution of Agentic Surfaces: The Harness Becomes Infrastructure (#AI4SDLC)

    I watched [a talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0X9QDRkIdg) by Anthropic’s Applied AI team on the evolution from Messages API to Claude Managed Agents. Its core idea: a harness encodes assumptions about what a model cannot yet do, making it the most perishable layer of the agent stack. It connects recent threads on [Claude Code’s 80% prompt cut](https://t.me/book_cube/4829), [Cursor cloud agents](https://t.me/book_cube/4821), and [Konstantin Krestnikov’s harness approach](https://t.me/book_cube/4825).

  34. #Management

    Code of Leadership S2E13: What Remains Scarce When Code Becomes Cheap? (#Management)

    What remains scarce when code becomes cheap: tools, engineering judgment, or trust between a company and its developers?

  35. #AI

    Yu Su on Agents: Intelligence + Continual Learning = Expertise (#AI)

    I watched Yu Su’s talk “[Intelligence + Continual Learning = Expertise](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6aiEf3aEFQ)” at AI Engineer World’s Fair 2026. An Ohio State University professor whose group produced Mind2Web, SeeAct, MMMU, and HippoRAG, Su brought [NeoCognition](https://neocognition.io/) out of stealth in April 2026 with a $40 million seed round. In twenty minutes, he tackles a question I share: why are coding agents a major success while agents for almost everything else still struggle?

  36. #Books

    Planet of Ants: I Bought the Book for My Son—and Read It Myself (#Books)

    My middle son really wanted a small ant colony, so we bought one. Then ordinary parental logic kicked in: if he had a colony, a book about ants would make a good gift. I chose Edward O. Wilson’s Russian edition, “Planet of Ants,” but read it myself before giving it to him—and genuinely loved it.

  37. #AI

    3 AImigo S1E2: AI Writes More Code. Why Isn’t Delivery Getting Faster? (#AI)

    This Friday at [12:00 Moscow time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIbGDZ6gq5g), the new episode of `3 AImigo` will examine a paradox that teams encounter more and more often: AI makes an individual engineer noticeably faster and produces more code, yet roughly the same number of changes reach users. Local speed is not the same as an accepted outcome, regardless of company size.

  38. #AI

    Peter Steinberger: “Fun Is Velocity” — an OpenClaw Retrospective (#AI)

    I watched OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger’s [talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whcfSGN6CAU) at Y Combinator Startup School 2026. I have already [covered](https://t.me/book_cube/4377) his interview about local-first agents and the claim that “80% of apps will disappear.” This is a different format: an inside look back at eight months of the project—what went wrong, why its creator stopped using his own product, and why “fun is velocity” is a measurable signal rather than a slogan.

  39. #AI4SDLC

    DeepSeek Harness: When an Agent’s History Becomes Part of Inference Economics (#AI4SDLC)

    I watched Cloud Codes’ [breakdown](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NyOG9z9RT0) of DeepSeek Harness. It is a useful continuation of my [longread on the co-evolution of the AI development stack](https://polomodov.tech/2026-07-23-ai-development-stack-codesign/): it shows how inference economics changes the architecture of an agent’s history.

  40. #AI4SDLC

    Paper: What a Design Tool for the Age of Agents Looks Like (#AI4SDLC)

    I watched Y Combinator’s Design Review episode “[How To Design In The Agent Era](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P06RgnUKX_I),” published on August 7, 2026. Paper founder Stephen Haney and YC partner Aaron Epstein review websites submitted by viewers. It is ostensibly a redesign show, but I was more interested in something else: [Paper](https://paper.design/) is a rare tool designed for agents from the ground up rather than retrofitted for them.

  41. #BookCube

    Live Stream with Mikhail Tyurganov on the Path to Technology Director

    An announcement of a live stream with Mikhail Tyurganov, Head of Digital Services Development at Alfa-Bank, about his path from tester, programmer, and small-business CEO to technology director, and how the CTO role changes when a small team grows into an organization of thousands.

  42. #AI

    Materials from the First Episode of the “3 AImigo” Podcast (Category AI)

    Materials from the first “3 AImigo” episode on the current state of AI development with Evgeny Sergeev, Alexey Litvinov, and Alexander Polomodov: the episode page, video, audio, a short transcript, and a bonus longread.

  43. #BookCube

    Dr. Seuss's “This Is Only the Beginning” — Motivational Reading for Big Changes

    A recommendation from Nastya: Dr. Seuss's “This Is Only the Beginning” is a reminder of how to find yourself, not be afraid of mistakes, and prepare for major changes.

  44. #BookCube

    Unexpected Children's Books That Adults Will Enjoy Too

    A selection of short children's books that adults will enjoy too: Dr. Seuss, Debi Gliori, Jean-Luc Fromental, and Daniela Kunkel on change, love, our race against time, friendship, and the shared sense of “we.”

  45. #AI4SDLC

    Boris Cherny: We Cut 80% of Claude Code's Prompt (Category AI4SDLC)

    A review of Claude Code creator Boris Cherny's talk about cutting more than 80% of the system prompt for Opus 5, rapidly expiring evals, product overhang, and the shift from prompt engineering to elicitation. The main conclusion is that the system prompt and CLAUDE.md become technical debt with a shelf life of one model generation.

  46. #AI4SDLC

    Materials from Part Three of the AMA Session with Alexey Litvinov (Category AI4SDLC)

    Materials from the final part of the AMA session with Alexey Litvinov on AI-assisted engineering: the episode page, video, audio, and a short transcript, plus links to Alexey's Telegram channel and YouTube channel.

  47. #Changes

    UK Global Talent — Endorsement Received (Category Changes)

    A personal account of receiving an endorsement for the UK's Global Talent visa through the Digital Technology / Exceptional Talent route: application requirements, recommendation letters and evidence documents, a working-backwards approach, collecting materials on polomodov.tech, refining the package, and the remaining visa stage.

  48. #AI4SDLC

    Claude Certified Architect: The Exam as a Map of Agent Engineering (Category AI4SDLC)

    A review of Frank Coyle's talk about the Claude Certified Architect — Foundations exam as a map of production agent architecture. It covers orchestration, tools and MCP, Claude Code, structured output, context management, reliability, and human oversight; its syllabus can also serve as a learning plan and architecture-review checklist.

  49. #AI4SDLC

    Harness: Why One Agent with Files Is Displacing Complex Scaffolding (Category AI4SDLC)

    Notes from Konstantin Krestnikov's talk on the shift from complex chains and multi-agent systems to the harness approach: one general-purpose agent, a file-based environment, a small toolset, and task-specific benchmarks. The post also covers DeepAgents, the Ralph loop, MetaLoop, and Anima SDK.

  50. #ProductManagement

    Materials from the Podcast “PRD == Evals: How AI Is Erasing the Boundary Between Product Managers and ML Engineers” with Albina Munirova from T-Bank (Category ProductManagement)

    We discussed how the product manager role is changing as the boundary between product managers and ML engineers becomes noticeably thinner.

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