Reading
What I'm learning from
Quick notes on what I took from the books, articles and reports I read, each with a link back to the original.
October 2026
- 📄 AI made developers faster. Is their judgment keeping up?
- The hollow orchestrator: approving more work each month without getting better at judging it.
- AI made writing code cheap, so judgment is now the scarce skill on a team.
- 📄 Speeding up code review with 'small-change'
- Median PR review time rose from about 33 to 77 minutes as AI raised the number of PRs.
- A lighter review path only pays off if deciding 'is this small?' is cheap.
- 📄 The Manager's Path in the age of AI ⭐
- AI improves visibility, not understanding; talk to people more, not less.
- Write the decisions you're accountable for (like reviews) yourself.
- 📄 Elephants, goldfish and design docs as the real artifact
- Design the doc in one long AI session, then test it on a fresh one.
- If a memoryless session can't build from the doc, the doc is the problem.
- 📄 How AI has changed my engineering leadership role
- Leads should stay hands-on with small, high-leverage safety fixes.
- AI lowers the bus factor, but it can't explain why code was built that way.
- 📊 LeadDev Engineering Leadership Report 2026: the player-coach is back
- Leaders are more hands-on, mostly because AI makes contributing easier.
- Fewer management seats, more scope each: the player-coach is back.
- 📘 Rock stars and superstars: growing people differently
- Rock stars want depth and stability; superstars want the next challenge.
- Both are valuable. Ask which one someone wants to be right now.
- 📘 Debt compounds, but so does paying it back
- Teams "treading water" ship critical work but never get ahead of debt.
- Repayment compounds too, once someone protects time for the first few.
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