There’s the usual stash of AI content below, but also a few pieces that give you a break from the non-stop AI train.

[article] Why SaaS freemium playbooks don’t work in AI, and what to do instead (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/why-saas-freemium-playbooks-dont). Good piece. Instead of the classic “give basic features for free and put premium behind a paywall”, AI products are upselling on usage intensity, outcomes, and most compute-heavy experiences.

[article] Designing front-end systems for cloud failure (https://www.infoworld.com/article/4167398/designing-front-end-systems-for-cloud-failure.html). Since I’m not a frontend guy, I haven’t thought much about this topic. But I liked the insights about degraded frontend experiences and the breadth of things that you need to guard against.

[blog] 10 Lessons for Agentic Coding (https://www.dbreunig.com/2026/05/04/10-lessons-for-agentic-coding.html). Today. Lessons for today. Who knows what the “good practices” will look like tomorrow?

[blog] Monitoring reliably at scale (https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/monitoring-reliably-at-scale-ca6483040930). What if your observability stack depends on the same systems that it monitors? Yikes. Airbnb wanted to break these circular dependencies.

[youtube-video] How a Group of Developers Took Back Control from Enterprise Java | Spring: The Documentary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gb1z-2SjHY). Wonderful video documentary that looks at the history and impact of the Spring Framework.

[blog] Cold Starts Are Costing You: Fix Them with GKE Pod Snapshots (https://medium.com/google-cloud/cold-starts-are-costing-you-fix-them-with-gke-pod-snapshots-733d4c1808c9). Wow, this’ll come in very handy for many people. Save app, file system, and network state into a snapshot used for subsequent Kubernetes pod startups.

[blog] Coding with AI Agents is Now a Baseline Expectation for Managers (https://code.dblock.org/2026/05/05/coding-with-ai-agents-is-now-a-baseline-expectation-for-managers.html). Fun post. You might reignite your passion for tech by throwing yourself into the toolchain your team is using.

[blog] Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite is now generally available on Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform (https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/gemini-3-1-flash-lite-is-now-generally-available). It’s a terrific model that’s fast and cost effective. Now GA across surfaces.

[blog] Choosing between APIs, MCP, and Agent-to-Agent architectures (https://lakshmanok.medium.com/choosing-between-apis-mcp-and-agent-to-agent-architectures-b88310e87733). Lak wants us to all default to REST APIs first, and only bring in MCPs and A2A when needed by reasoning agents.

[blog] AlphaEvolve: How our Gemini-powered coding agent is scaling impact across fields (https://deepmind.google/blog/alphaevolve-impact/). It’s so great to see advances like this, where AI is contributing original insights.

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