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🥗 Trendy Leaders, Code Reviews Reimagined, Managing Up, Rewarding Teams, Locus of Control: TMW #498

Time to abstract your AI models? What the community thinks...
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This week's TMW is sponsored by Okta and Auth0 - platforms to secure all types of identity from AI agents to your customers, employees, and partners.

Hello, hello, hello, welcome to the week!

The week the community all got a bit fed up with AI models

A contentious but popular thread dominated the CTO Craft community Slack this week. It started with one member announcing they were cancelling their top tier AI subscription, worn down by talking a model out of yet another four paragraph preamble. Forty odd replies later, dozens of members had turned it into the most useful thread of the week. Nobody was writing off AI coding, quite the opposite, everyone in there uses it daily and have simply got to the point of needing abstraction... The pattern that emerged was people building themselves an exit route, so changing model is a config change rather than a migration.

Four things worth stealing

  • Treat models as commodity. Several members have moved to a neutral harness like pi.dev or opencode to avoid vendor lock in. Setup was lighter than expected, one simply asked their existing tool to configure it.
  • Route by task, not loyalty. Frontier model for reasoning and planning, cheaper tier for bulk code, heavy model saved for quant style analysis. Do it backwards and you will burn your limits in two sessions.
  • Short standing instructions beat memory. Phrases like "concise, opinionated response" outperformed any memory feature, and more than one member is thinking of switching memory off entirely.
  • Instruction drift is real. Hard rules ignored at random, with no correlation to how full the context window was. Attention was the word that kept coming up, and the thread's honest answer was a shrug.

Something to do today: Open the tool you use most and work out how long it would take to swap the model underneath it. If that is more than an afternoon, there is your side quest. Pin your prompt style into one line of standing instruction, run the same task on a second model, and see whether you miss the first one.

That's it, let's look at some links! See you next week

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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Reads of the Week

Load-Bearing People
The eleven lines of code that broke the internet, and what they teach us about our teams
Fish Food for ThoughtMike Fisher
The Resurrection of a Manager: Your Role Has a Second Life
Whether You Are Already in the Gap or Watching it Widen Around You: 3 Role Redesigns and Why Coasting in the Middle is Not a Fourth
The Socratic LeadershipPetros Bountis

Leadership, Strategy & Business

The trendy leadership trend that is trending | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership
A simple way to survey where you are heading and what to do about it
Jade Rubick - Engineering LeadershipJade Rubick
On managing up and how to do it
The golden rule of managing up is to think from your manager’s perspective
Effective Engineering LeadersJames Samuel
The Control Trap
In which we fix incidents by scheduling meetings about them
JoTJeff
The Change Formula
For change to occur, dissatisfaction with the status quo, multiplied by a vision of the future, multiplied by a credible path forward, must exceed the resistance to change.
Leadership LibraryLeadership Library

Culture, People & Teams

How software engineers really feel about AI taking their jobs · Richard Raduly
Six months of talking to engineers about AI, and the emotion underneath it that rarely makes the coverage.
Richard RadulyRichard Raduly
You Get What You Reward — Leadership Garden
Telling your team quality matters changes nothing. Here is what actually moves engineering culture, and the test for whether your fix is real.
Leadership GardenCsaba Okrona
Tell candidates why and how they failed
When a candidate goes through your entire interview process, and you end up deciding not to hire, they deserve to know why.
Norberto LopesNorberto Lopes
TBM 438: Am I the Only Weirdo in This Company?
Why organizations are often more diverse in belief than they appear to be in behavior
The Beautiful MessJohn Cutler

Technology, Operations & Delivery

Maybe We Shouldn’t Be Reviewing All This Code
Or, perhaps the problem isn’t that AI has broken code review, maybe it’s that we’ve been using code review to solve the wrong problems
martinfowler.comRachel Laycock
The End of Code Review? Or an Opportunity to Rethink it?
Code review is probably on its last legs, and we should focus on how to retain the indirect benefits it provided…
The Last Software Engineer?Christian Kästner
The Agent Doesn’t Know It’s a Prototype
Team autonomy in the agentic software development era
It Depends: Lessons in Technology LeadershipKevin Goldsmith
Why High Utilization Hurts Productivity in Knowledge Work
High utilization can make knowledge work slower. Learn how excess workload creates queues, delays, lower flow efficiency and less time to think.
Nigel Thurlow - Executive Coach | Board Advisor | Renowned SpeakerNigel Thurlow

Stress, Wellbeing & Growth

Stuff happens. Where you look matters. How your Locus of Control affects your success.
Your locus of control determines where you look first when something goes wrong. You don’t control everything that happens. You always control what you do next.
Management Excellence by Art PettyArt Petty
Fredkin’s Paradox
Overthinking similar alternatives.
PerspectiveshipMichał Poczwardowski
The Immaturity Penalty - Leadership Freak
Immaturity doesn’t stay inside a person. It bleeds on everyone. One defensive person delays honest conversations. One hothead makes everyone walk on eggshells. An insecure leader turns talented people into threats. One leader who needs to be right keeps everyone working on the wrong problem. Gain insight into the immaturity penalty.
Leadership FreakDan Rockwell
How safe are you from people who push your buttons? | Chatsworth Consulting Group
Chatsworth Consulting GroupLisa Kohn

That’s it!

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Have an amazing week!

Andy

Published by:

Andy Skipper