AI

A collection of 27 posts

Agentic Engineering Management

To what extent AI is OK to use in software development might be debated, but in general, the idea is not a controversial one anymore. The debate rather moved on from code completion and simple PR summarizations to Agentic Engineering, where an execution loop allows an AI Agent to function

24 Apr 2026 8 min read

Péter's Updates #72 - Less is More

(Belated) Happy New Year! I gave up naming these updates with the week numbers when the issues became more sporadic and decided to switch to simply numbering them. 72 already! Back when I started this newsletter, the regularity gave me some structure that, back then, I missed from my professional

23 Jan 2026 6 min read

Week 48-50, 2025 - Junior Luck

Turns out regular newsletter publishing isn't my forte... anyway. In late November, I checked out an AI meetup with three interesting talks. Some of them didn't have time or ambitions to go deep into details, and there was one who didn't even promise that,

12 Dec 2025 3 min read

Week 42-43, 2025 - Thousand Words

We're working hard behind the scenes with Jeremy to prepare for the third season of our engineering leadership podcast, The Retrospective. I don't want to jinx it, but at this point, it seems safe to say we'll start releasing episodes soon, so I want

24 Oct 2025 3 min read

Week 28-38, 2025 - Reboot

📋 What I learned recently A few weeks ago, I ditched Notion and started to use Obsidian. It's not about privacy in my case; I'm just slightly paranoid about losing access to my documents due to any mistake made by a service provider, myself, or a third

19 Sep 2025 4 min read

Week 19, 2025 - Memory and Skill

It was 1995, springtime like now, and I was sitting on one of my first university exams. The subject was UNIX shell scripting, and our task was to write some code using grep/awk/sed to manipulate text files. We had an hour or so to complete the script, and

09 May 2025 3 min read

Week 15, 2025 - Kung Fu

This week on my Engineering Manager challenges series I wrote about handling an ambitious developer who announces they want to be an Engineering Manager too. I wrote about goals, risks, details to discover, and ways to support this engineer regardless of current organizational opportunities. Read it here if you missed

11 Apr 2025 6 min read

Week 11, 2025 - Structure and Freedom

I missed the regular Friday launch of this newsletter. Work is picking up, and the conversations I’m having are inspiring and rewarding — but draining my creative energy. A few days ago, someone took the effort to thank me profoundly for a positive feedback I gave, and this experience triggered

15 Mar 2025 4 min read

Week 9, 2025 - Trust Issues

I had an overdue catch-up call with a friend this week. He shared experiences of frustration and shock from a job he recently left. Decades-old codebase, people who built or even understand it long gone, incompetent leadership. When I asked him what did he learn from this experience, after some

28 Feb 2025 8 min read

Week 7, 2025 - Goose Chase

Yesterday, I visited the new exhibition at the Light Art Museum in Budapest with my daughter Chloé, where the above installation is on display too. Years ago, when I first heard that they were turning a struggling market hall into an exhibition center, I was frustrated. Our office used to

14 Feb 2025 4 min read

Week 3, 2025 - New Horizons

It was a busy week. Indeed, it was so busy that I overplanned my Friday and didn’t have enough energy left to finish and send out this newsletter. Usually, I don’t like to work on Saturdays, so this is an exception. This week I left behind thousands of

18 Jan 2025 5 min read

Week 2, 2025 - Boot Up

Welcome back! I hope you had a great wind down and are starting the new year with energy and optimism. I managed to step back a bit from this site, turn work off a bit, recharge, and think about what I want to do in 2025. On the podcasting front,

10 Jan 2025 5 min read

Week 46, 2024 - Solo Games

Yesterday I wrote about a topic I’m far from being immune to: Impostor Syndrome. As with many of my articles, I focused on new Engineering Managers, but the patterns and mitigation mechanisms I found working might be useful for a wider audience too. We’ve also launched a new

15 Nov 2024 5 min read

Notes on the 2024 DORA Report

This is the 11th time DORA (acquired by Google in 2018) publishes their yearly Accelerate State of DevOps report. I went through the 100+ pages, and listed a few points that surprised me — surprised often not in the sense of radically new ideas, but more like earlier beliefs that are

07 Nov 2024 3 min read

Week 38, 2024 - Floods

Sunday evening, out of boredom, I checked my blog's stats and saw that 239 people were reading my site. I don’t share visitor statistics much, so you have to believe me that it’s not usual that 239 people read my site concurrently. Having a handful at

20 Sep 2024 4 min read

Week 37, 2024 - Sick Data

In 2002, a friend of mine used to work in CERN on a cool project: writing the software stack for a new generation of network cards that could transfer an unprecedented amount of data in a very short time. You know, all the stuff you want to record when you

13 Sep 2024 6 min read

Week 30-35, 2024 - Endless Summer

I’m back from a month of travel around France, something we try to do every year (we’re a French-Hungarian family living in Budapest). This is an opportunity to get a lot of cycling done, meet friends I rarely see, spend more time with family, and enjoy long drives

30 Aug 2024 5 min read

Week 25, 2024 - Fixes, Improvements and AI Agents

Summer is on, at full speed. Temperatures are getting dangerously close to 40ºC on some days. School is over too. All these will make me slow down a bit in the next few weeks. I’ll try to keep the Friday updates on, but realistically there’s going to be

21 Jun 2024 4 min read

Week 24, 2024 - AI coding, Search and Creativity

As some of you are probably aware, we had the European Parlament and local elections in Hungary. As we discussed on Monday in our podcast with Jeremy, the Budapest mayoral election was a crazy race. At some point during the vote count the difference between the leading candidates was only

14 Jun 2024 4 min read

Week 17, 2024 - Substack and AI Assistants

What an awesome week, full of spending time with great people. I managed to publish my thoughts on why companies should go one step beyond just tolerating, and fully embrace Celebrating Failure. I finished yesterday afternoon, and the first feedback is great, somebody even added that FAIL is just an

26 Apr 2024 4 min read

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