Week 16, 2025 - Eggheads
Happy Easter weekend if you’re celebrating this, or just live in a part of the world where Friday and Monday are a day off. I’m planning to spend some time with family. We found an old LEGO BOOST set that my daughters played with a bit years ago, and realized we hadn't built half of what’s possible back then.
Since the last newsletter, we started to record the third season of The Retrospective, my engineering leadership podcast with Jeremy Brown. I’m so excited to get back to these discussions! Explaining a leadership concept, or challenging my partner on it is a great way to solidify knowledge. We’ll launch in a few days and then release new episodes every second week, just like during Season 2. Subscribe on the site or plug in your favourite podcasting app if you want to be among the first ones to hear it.
This week on my Engineering Manager challenges series, I wrote about a difficult situation having to reunite a deeply fractioned team as a new manager. Check it here if you missed it.
📋 What I learned this week
My MCP-enhanced Claude coding sessions reached an obstacle. I’m building a web app that I was planning to deploy with Docker. I’m familiar with this from a user’s perspective from homelabbing, and I want to reach the simplicity seen there, where users only need to add a few lines to their Docker Compose file. However, I haven't used this as a developer yet. From network and web server issues through missing dependencies and small platform differences, I think I faced everything, and Claude is seemingly running in circles until I use up my daily quota. I’ll give it a fresh shot next week, but I’ll probably have to just roll up my sleeves and dig into some documentation.
Someone explained his experience with AI-assisted coding as “great to get you from 0 to 1, but problems start appearing at the next step”. I can empathize with that.
Meanwhile, I launched a re-designed (or rather, restructured) version of peterszasz.com. The goal was to show all the content I’m producing and the services I offer. First step is done – but the site is now a wall of text… Next, I’ll need to restructure a bit more and spend some time better integrating Substack content.
🤔 Articles that made me think
The Post-Developer Era
Good summary of how I also see the current “AI will take developers’ work” hype. Josh is more pragmatic, comparing his experience working with LLMs to an efficient collaboration, where some tasks are more suited for AI, and others for human execution.
MCPs are a Security Nightmare
Well, that's not the exact title of the article, but pretty much the gist of it. I wrote about how I love MCPs last week — here’s the other side of that coin: numerous attack vectors, from private information leaking to remote code execution (or whatever that is in an LLM prompting context…). I think we’re still in the early phases of a new tool with big potential. After the first few major security incidents, I’m sure the protocol will mature to better prevent abuse. There are already some pioneers in the area, and current dependency analysis tools will probably incorporate this feature soon, too.
Measuring Human Leadership Skills with AI Agents
This study proves that the leadership test they are using yields very similar results regardless of whether the individual under assessment is guiding a team set up of humans or AI assistants. On first check, this sounds interesting: if this is true, you could set up a simple, cost-efficient test to test applicants for a leadership position, or select the person with the most potential within your organization to consider for a managerial role. However, there’s a huge assumption underlying the results: that the test used is an appropriate way to measure leadership skills, regardless of leading a human or AI team. I’m quite sceptical. The test is to solve a Hidden Profile puzzle, where clues are distributed in the team, and the subject being assessed is the only one who can communicate (via written chat) with everyone. Sure, you need leadership skills to be efficient in distilling this information. But is this all that it takes to be a good leader? I'm not sure.
📊 Something cool: The R&D Reporting Guide
This is a comprehensive guide for Product and Engineering leaders at SaaS companies, focused on the key metrics and frameworks needed to monitor and improve R&D performance. It includes reporting best practices, definitions and calculations for each metric, and companion templates. Even if you’re not in a C-level role, there are a lot of good ideas to get inspired by, or cherry-pick something to experiment with in your teams.
That’s it for today, hide some easter eggs this weekend,
Péter