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Everything filed under Engineering Leadership, newest first.
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The Problem is not the AI Code, but Nobody Knows Anything Anymore
Simon Späti argues the real risk of AI-written codebases is not mediocre generated code, but teams that lose architecture knowledge and intent because everyone just asks the model.
4 min · 836 words
A Staff Engineer's Guide to Inventing Work
Sujith Jay Nair explains how platform staff engineers invent roadmap work by reading signals from systems, users, the organization, and the industry—when there is no PM or revenue line to follow.
8 min · 1,756 words
Claude Code creator Boris Cherny shares an internal note on product judgment under AI: gather information, act with urgency, and treat being wrong quickly as a feature of good leadership—not a failure.
2 min · 372 words
the senior engineer death spiralon proving yourself, burning out, and being a good teammate
Sunil Pai names a common failure mode for engineers in new senior roles: cosplaying harder ambition, disappearing into secret overwork, burning out, then damaging trust. His antidote is to drop a level—become the greatest teammate first.
4 min · 993 words
Aleksandar Filipovski, 2026-09-16 See also: John Salvatier’s excellent blog, Reality has a surprising amount of detail I read a comment somewhere that stuck with me, that went something like this:
8 min · 1,784 words
Towards Self-Driving Codebases
Detail explores what it would take for AI agents to drive real software work end-to-end—beyond oneshot games and guarded migrations—while humans still steer most production engineering today.
9 min · 2,151 words
A systems engineer's rant about AI-agent hype, broken email, and how people without engineering background are shipping half-baked 'industry changing' ideas from agent-infested homelabs.
6 min · 1,447 words
You are the AI agent's harnessPreventing hallucinations upstream by treating the engineer as the harness.
A recently popular approach to AI-assisted coding is to build runtime harnesses around the model's output — review agents, verification loops, multi-pass pipelines that catch hallucinations after they happen.
14 min · 3,269 words
Kellan Elliott-McCrea reflects on management as catalysis—lowering activation energy for teams—rather than another fashionable org-chart experiment destined for the tech-blog receipts pile.
4 min · 913 words
The most important product decision is what you don't build
Liam Nugent on saying no to document hubs and notification centres in consumer fintech—and why the features you refuse often protect product clarity more than the ones you ship.
5 min · 1,079 words
Roadmap decisions rather than dates.Original article link with an AI-written directory summary
Will Larson uses a passkey rollout to argue for roadmaps centered on decisions and concrete tradeoffs. A working implementation can expose unresolved questions that dates and abstract commitments leave hidden.
1 min · 76 wordsagent-written
Middle management roles are also a trap.Original article link with an AI-written directory summary
An examination of how middle management develops valuable coordination skills while leaving gaps in preparation for executive work. Will Larson discusses the limits of treating organizational advancement as a straightforward progression.
1 min · 77 wordsagent-written
Generated and suppressed demand.Original article link with an AI-written directory summary
Team capacity can hide work people have stopped requesting, while improvements can generate new demand. Will Larson extends his model of struggling engineering teams to account for both effects in growing organizations.
1 min · 78 wordsagent-written
Make no assumptions.Original article link with an AI-written directory summary
Long-lived codebases accumulate layers of architectural assumptions as ownership changes. Will Larson considers how leaders can work effectively in complex domains without assuming that today's design reflects a single coherent plan.
1 min · 77 wordsagent-written
Revised rules of engineering leadership.Original article link with an AI-written directory summary
Will Larson revisits his engineering leadership principles after working through rapid growth and changes in AI tooling. The essay considers individual ownership of migrations, implementation quality, and the changing cost of large technical projects.
1 min · 80 wordsagent-written
Real-Time Feedback: My Closing Move in Every Interview
Mark Grebler explains ending interviews by giving candid capability feedback on the spot—so candidates can correct misunderstandings and the process becomes two-way.
2 min · 374 words
Christoph Nakazawa updates his LLM workflow and names values that still matter with coding agents: ownership, taste, guardrails, repo context, owning your stack, and option value.
2 min · 552 words
Early and late-stage hypergrowth.Original article link with an AI-written directory summary
Early hypergrowth can concentrate a company on one urgent problem at a time; later growth demands progress across many areas. Will Larson explains how that difference changes leadership staffing and organizational scope.
1 min · 78 wordsagent-written
Side-stepping the Secretary Problem, unwittingly.
A hiring essay on accidentally side-stepping the classic secretary problem—how real interview pipelines diverge from optimal-stopping theory and what that means for candidate selection.
11 min · 2,529 words
Judgment and creativity are all you need.Original article link with an AI-written directory summary
Will Larson reflects on replacing manual deployment and migration procedures with automated validation. The essay connects dependable delivery systems with the judgment and creativity still required to improve engineering work.
1 min · 76 wordsagent-written