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7 min read

🥦 Social Loafing, Slop Cannons, Strategy Failures, Bad Apples, Contagious Code, Belonging: TMW #481

The shift from adoption to control of your team's AI is upon us - are you ready?
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Thank you re:cinq for sponsoring this week's TMW - designing and building AI Native platforms your teams can operate, trust, and scale

Hello, hello, hello, welcome to the week!

We have a new event in the diary for June 18th: CTO Craft Bytes returns with a timely session on the AI that's already inside your engineering org, and the real challenge now is control, not adoption. It’s a focused, senior-level conversation for technology leaders who are navigating how AI is actually being used across teams, what risks it introduces, and how to bring it under a clear operating model.

CTO Craft Bytes: AI is Already Inside Your Engineering Org. The Question is Not Adoption, it’s Control | CTO Craft
Johann Beukes joins CTO Bytes to cut through AI adoption noise: where it genuinely improves output, where it introduces risk, and how to measure what matters.
CTO Craft

This is especially relevant right now because AI has moved from pilot projects to everyday practice, making governance, visibility, and measurable impact urgent priorities rather than future concerns. Attending will help you separate hype from operational reality and leave with practical ideas for steering AI use in ways that improve engineering performance without losing control.

That's it, let's look at some links....

Andy @ CTO Craft

Ps. By the way, we've about to launch a discount portal for CTO Craft Slack members, with offers from Stripe, Notion, Airtable, Auth0, AWS and hundreds of others. Now might be the time to sign up!

CTO Craft Con - Dates for Your Diary

CTO Craft Con: Toronto
Join CTO Craft Con: Toronto- an intimate, community-centered gathering for engineering leaders to connect, learn through insightful sessions, and build real peer relationships in a supportive environment.
CTO Craft Con: Toronto 2026
CTO Craft Con: Europe 2026
Join CTO Craft Con Europe 2026 in Amsterdam - an intimate, community-centered gathering for engineering leaders to connect, learn through insightful sessions, and build real peer relationships in a supportive environment.
CTO Craft Con: Europe 2026
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119 named patterns, six modes of operation, and enterprise case studies covering architecture, teams, and delivery models.

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CTO Craft Mixers Coming Up

See the whole Mixer calendar here - not in your city yet? Drop us a line!

Reads of the Week

The science of social loafing: why groups kill individual effort (and…
A French engineer discovered why people slack off in groups (social loafing). Progressive organizations like Buurtzorg and Haier found the antidote.
Corporate Rebels
The slop cannons in your engineering org
A field guide to the engineers and designers firing AI agents at every problem in sight
Handy AIJake Handy

Leadership, Strategy & Business

Common Engineering Strategy Failure Factors
Make your strategy more robust to avoid common mistakes
Engineering StrategyAleix Morgadas
Measuring Manager Effectiveness -- Can You Even Quantify It?
Dev Leader Weekly 138
Dev Leader WeeklyDev Leader
Positional leadership: the emperor’s new clothes of management
The Emperor’s New Clothes explains why positional leadership fails. Erich Fromm saw it decades ago: having authority vs being an authority.
Corporate Rebels
Two Captains, One Ship
The CTO/CEO relationship is the most important and least discussed dynamic in early-stage startups. How to navigate the partnership without becoming an order-taker or sinking the ship.
Alex Kurilin

Culture, People & Teams

Can one bad apple ruin your team?
ALSO: AI is ruining workplace chat and leaving people lonely
Make Work BetterBruce Daisley
The Senior Engineer Crisis Isn’t Coming. It’s Already Here.
AI is cutting junior hiring. But the engineers that won’t exist in 10 years are being decided right now. Here’s what I think actually happens next.
Leadership GardenCsaba Okrona
A Boring Annual Review Is the Best
What happens when feedback doesn’t wait for a form
High-Impact EngineeringRoman Nikolaev
From Functional Silos to Stream-Aligned Success - Yaniv Preiss
It seems highly logical to split teams by function, like backend and frontend. But the downside is too great to ignore. How are stream-aligned teams more valuable?
Yaniv PreissYaniv Preiss

Technology, Operations & Delivery

Platform Engineering End-to-End | Blog
Platform engineering is more than DevOps with a portal. This post walks the full arc of the discipline end to end: why platforms exist, how to build and operate them, how to manage the messy stakeholder politics, and what success actually looks like. Grounded in Fournier and Nowland’s book and a few years of doing this on real systems.
Luca CavallinLuca Cavallin
Bad code is contagious
How imitation machines turn local mistakes into system-wide conventions
JoTJeff
The Human in the Loop Isn’t Going Anywhere: They’re Just Moving Up
For the 7th post in the Intelligent Quality Leadership series, I have dived into where having a human still involved in the loop is crucial. These are my thoughts, would love to hear others on this…
Simon PriorView all posts by siprior
Why your releases feel harder than they should
And why is the problem almost never at the time of deployment?
The Optimist EngineerMarcos F. Lobo 🗻🧭

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

You Can’t Fake Belonging
What the science says about why feeling like you fit in
Fish Food for ThoughtMike Fisher
You Taught the Company to Overload You
As the person who keeps telling tech leaders to stop being so negative and shoot down everything (the infamous “CT-No”), I feel obliged to address the other extreme. The VP of Engineering who tries…
Aviv Ben-Yosef
Say the Thing You Want
If you want something at work, say it out loud. Your silence isn’t saving you.
Terrible Software
The sunset of Arrogance as a Service
An essay about the past AI-promises-era and how we got here in the first place
ValeriaVGValeria Viana Gusmao

That’s it!

If you’d like to be considered for the free CTO Craft Community, fill in your details here, and we’ll be in touch!

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Have an amazing week!

Andy

Published by:

Andy Skipper