The Balanced Engineer Newsletter

May 2026 • Issue # 45

ATTENTION: We are 1/3 of the way through the year. 33% already! Where did the time go?

These past two months have been a blur (oops I accidentally skipped a newsletter month again). I celebrated a wedding, did a cross-country trip with my three kids, attended Atmosphereconf AND Google Cloud Next, and had... let's just say a busy time at work. :)

Here are a few of the things I've enjoyed reading and listening to recently, as well as some of the content I've managed to make despite the insanity!

🔧 Technical Excellence

Building Effective Agents by Erik Schluntz and Barry Zhang (Anthropic)

Summary: This is Anthropic's foundational engineering post on what actually works when building agentic systems, drawing from a year of working with customer teams across industries. The authors draw a clear line between workflows (LLMs orchestrated through predefined code paths) and agents (LLMs dynamically directing their own work) and walk through five composable workflow patterns: prompt chaining, routing, parallelization, orchestrator-workers, and evaluator-optimizer, before getting into autonomous agents. The throughline is that the most successful implementations they've seen use simple, composable patterns rather than complex frameworks.

Why this resonates: I keep coming back to this one as I think more about the difference between "I've stitched together a workflow" and "I've actually built an agent." That distinction has gotten muddier in conversation as everything gets called an agent, and having the precise definitions to reach for has been useful. The advice to start with direct API calls before reaching for a framework also matches what I'm seeing in my own building, particularly as models get more capable and need less of a framework to operate.

🧠 Mental Models & Problem Solving

THE PEOPLE DO NOT YEARN FOR AUTOMATION by Nilay Patel (Decoder / The Verge)

Summary: Nilay introduces the term "software brain" to describe a way of seeing the world that fits everything into algorithms, databases, and loops. He argues this worldview has quietly run the business world for decades, but AI has supercharged it, and that's a big part of why public sentiment toward AI is so negative even as ChatGPT usage keeps climbing. He pulls in polling, including the finding that Gen Z, the generation using AI most, is also souring on it fastest, and makes the case that the gap between tech industry enthusiasm and regular people's experience isn't a marketing problem.

Why this resonates: As a software engineer I definitely have "Software brain". It's easy to forget that not everything benefits from being modeled as a database, and that the people I'm building for don't necessarily want their lives turned into a series of automated loops. It's a useful check on my own assumptions, especially when working on AI-adjacent products where the temptation is to assume more automation is always better.

⚖️ Work-Life Integration

I am in an abusive relationship with the technology industry from Salma Alam-Naylor

Summary: Salma writes about a moment of grief-induced burnout that started with a folk music video and turned into a reckoning with how AI has saturated every corner of her work. She talks about a friend who now feels like an administrator rather than an engineer because they only talk to Claude all day, the rise of company-wide AI mandates, and the strange pressure to adopt tools you don't actually enjoy or benefit from. It's a raw look at many of the drawbacks of the way things are going right now.

Why this resonates: I'm all in on AI tools but often feel myself thinking along these lines pretty frequently. It's hard to not despair at what has been lost and what has changed over time. I think that Salma really captures the mood many folks are feeling right now. Also, she recently made a music video and release a new song, and it is excellent!

What I've Been Building

A quick look at what I've been working on lately

Blog posts

• Embrace the Uncertainty
• Why I'm betting on ATProto (and why you should, too)

Overcommitted Podcast

• Ep. 49 | Using AI Agents in Software Development 2026: Current Uses and Future Possibilities
• Ep. 50 | Making Long Bets: How GitHub Next Shapes the Future of Software Engineering with Idan Gazit
• Ep. 51 | AI as a Power Up, Not Autopilot: Craig Dennis on Boosting Productivity and Software Development Education
• Ep. 52 | Overcommitted After One Year: Insights on Software Projects, Growth, and What's Next
• Ep. 53 | Scaling Search Engineering at DoorDash: From Monoliths to Custom Search Engines with Satish Saley
• Ep. 54 | Building Bulletproof Systems: Warren Parad on Software Engineering for High Availability
• Ep. 55 | Building Your Own Tech Career Path - Bootcamp, Teaching & Big Platforms with Sabrina Goldfarb
• Ep. 56 | Run Toward Something - Career Growth, Mentorship & Work-Life Balance with Dave Schwantes
• Ep. 57 | Build Real Tools, Skip LeetCode: Systems Programming for Career Growth with John Crickett

Join us on Discord!

Our next book club for The Staff Engineer's Path starts soon!!

Come hang out with the Overcommitted community on Discord! We're chatting about engineering, career growth, and all the things we're learning together.

Have comments or questions about this newsletter? Or just want to be internet friends? Send me an email at brittany@balancedengineer.com or reach out on Bluesky or LinkedIn. Until next month!