A working engineer never stops reading. The goal here isn’t to follow everything — it’s to pick a few sources whose taste you trust and check them regularly. This list leans toward voices that combine real craft with honesty about where the field is heading, especially as agentic AI reshapes how we build. Treat the AI + Software Engineering entries as required background for our AI Collaboration Competency outcome.

How to use this

Pick one craft source, one industry source, and one AI source; add a couple of YouTube channels for ambient awareness; and skim a community feed daily. Read deeply in a few places rather than skimming everywhere. The resources are ordered by theme: craft & design, industry & career, AI + software engineering, YouTube (news, depth, and our React/TypeScript stack), communities, and a podcast.

On the AI picks

Think of Simon Willison as how to work with coding agents day to day and Andrej Karpathy as the mental models underneath them. Karpathy’s distinction between vibe coding and agentic engineering is worth holding onto as you work this quarter — vibe coding raises the floor so anyone can build something, while agentic engineering preserves the professional quality bar: you move faster, but you are still fully responsible for your software. That tension is the heart of what we’re practicing.

(Karpathy joined Anthropic in mid-2026 and his Eureka Labs education work is on hold, so his existing videos and his feed on X are the best places to find him.)

Hacker News as taste-building

Treat Hacker News as more than a link feed — it’s a place to develop taste. The comment threads show how experienced engineers reason about trade-offs, and also how confidently wrong smart people can be. Reading it critically is a skill in itself.

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Suggestions and additions welcome — contact me to amend and update.