Aug 17, 2026 8 min read

🐡 Unfocused Teams, Variation, Subtraction, Landing the Plane, Invisible Work, Stewardship, Energy Management: TMW #495

The best engineering leadership reads from the last week

Hello, hello, hello, welcome to the week!

The past week's most active discussion in the CTO Craft Slack was about engineers taking on product-discovery work as AI accelerates delivery, with a "Homer's Car" analogy for shipping too fast for the business to absorb.

Members debated whether AI is turning engineers into de facto product managers, with one leader describing a team that burned through a 12-month roadmap in four months by pairing engineers directly with domain areas, warning that speed without matching go-to-market capacity risks building "Homer's Car" (features nobody asked for, badly bolted together). Others countered that not every engineer has the product instincts for this and that the real unlock is building platforms and guardrails that let domain experts build for themselves rather than teaching engineers empathy.

It's a sharp snapshot of a community wrestling with the same tension in real time.. AI hasn't just sped up shipping, it's quietly rewriting the job description for "engineer," and the smart money in the discussion landed on investing in the connective tissue (platforms, discovery loops, feedback channels) rather than trying to clone yourself eighteen times over.

What's your experience been? Drop me a reply

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

Andy @ CTO Craft

Ps. If you're in an engineering leadership role, you absolutely need to be on top of the latest data on compensation and long-term incentives - have a look at our recent Compensation Report for all the latest insights.

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