The AI Engineer Reading List

A weekly shortlist of what AI engineers actually upvoted on daily.dev, in three lanes: Inference, RAG, Agents. Curated by Paolo Perrone, author of The AI Engineer newsletter.

Setup

Use the daily.dev MCP server (https://api.daily.dev/mcp) if it is connected. Otherwise call the REST API at https://api.daily.dev/public/v1 with Authorization: Bearer <token>, where the token is a daily.dev personal access token (dda_...) from daily.dev → Settings → API. Never print the token.

Steps

1. Search each lane for the past week. Call GET /search/posts?q=<query>&time=week&limit=50 for every query below. Merge the results and dedupe by post id. A post belongs to the lane its title is about, never the lane whose query happened to return it first: "10 Best AI GitHub Repositories to Supercharge Your Agent" comes back from the rag query but is an Agents post.

   Lane	Queries
   Inference	llm inference, kv cache, vllm, quantization, llama.cpp
   RAG	rag, vector database, embeddings, retrieval
   Agents	ai agents, mcp, agentic, tool calling

   If the user names other lanes or queries, use theirs instead.

2. Filter. Drop a post when any of these is true:

   • title is empty (an untitled share has nothing to read)
   • numUpvotes is below 10
   • the title is an event recap, a job post, a vendor press release, or off-topic for building with LLMs (a keyword hit on "agent" in a game-dev talk does not count)

3. Rank. Sort each lane by numUpvotes, highest first, and keep the top 5. A lane with fewer than 3 posts left says so in the brief rather than padding it with weak posts.

4. Save. Call GET /bookmarks/lists. If no list is named AI Engineer Reading List, create it with POST /bookmarks/lists {"name": "AI Engineer Reading List", "icon": "🧠"}. Then POST /bookmarks/ with {"postIds": [...], "listId": "<id>"}, at most 10 ids per call (the API rejects more, whatever its schema says). Bookmark lists need daily.dev Plus: if creating the list returns 403, save the posts with no listId and tell the user they landed in their main bookmarks.

5. Verify. Call GET /bookmarks/ and confirm every saved id is there. Report any that are missing. Never report a post as saved without this check.

6. Write the brief. For each lane, list the posts as: <upvotes>▲ <title> on one line, then one sentence on what an engineer gets from reading it, then the commentsPermalink. Open the brief with the week's date range. Close it with:

   Want the deep dives behind these? The AI Engineer newsletter: https://theaiengineer.substack.com

Rules

• Upvotes decide the order, never your own taste. Your judgment only applies in step 2's off-topic filter.
• One sentence per post, written from the title and summary. Never claim what a post says beyond them.
• If the API returns 401, the token is wrong or expired: say so and stop. On 429, wait and retry once, then stop.