Daily Reading List – May 19, 2026 (#787)

Whew. The workday isn’t done yet, but I’m getting a quick breather from Google I/O going on this week. The keynotes were terrific, and I just finished a breakout with two superstar presenters. Below you’ll find a few I/O items I read, and then non-Google stuff.

[blog] I/O 2026: Welcome to the agentic Gemini era. Huge momentum, and a fantastic array of announcements and releases. Here are some key highlights.

[blog] Gemini 3.5: frontier intelligence with action. This latest family of models is here, starting with Gemini 3.5 Flash, available today.

[blog] Introducing Gemini Omni. This was the most impressive thing I saw today. Truly transformational technology.

[blog] Building the agentic future: Developer highlights from I/O 2026. We shipped a huge refresh to Antigravity, our agent-first way of building. Also check this out for a new Managed Agents service, and improvements to Google AI Studio.

[article] Agent Skills Work but the Research Shows Most Teams Are Building Them Wrong. Some very actionable advice here on what to put in a skill, how to structure them, and how to think about their lifecycle.

[blog] Everything Google Cloud customers need to know coming out of Google I/O. Sometimes, it seems we ship consumer-focused features that our enterprise customers can’t take advantage of. Many of today’s releases were for everyone.

[article] We Went Multi-Cloud and Almost Drowned: Lessons From Running Across AWS, GCP, and Azure. Nothing makes multi-cloud infrastructure “easy.” At best, a product can make it “easier.” This shows where some of the pain lives.

[blog] Deploying to Agent Platform with ADK. Simple example, but also simple to follow if you want to see the way to deploy and test and agent.

[article] Why Is It So Hard to Write a Good Design Doc? (Part 1). Can the AI read the code, and with good prompting, generate a human-approved design doc? Seems like you get some shallow results without the right human guidance.

[blog] The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon. Bargaining power doesn’t exist for most roles today, including engineers. Scope is different, as are expectations. AI is part of it, but not the cause according to Sean.

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