About the Publication
Every month, hundreds of CTOs convene at Gather events to figure out what’s actually working for AI adoption in engineering. The conversation has moved past copilots. We’re all thinking about how to go from the modest gains of augmented engineering to the multiples that come from deploying a reliable, trustworthy agentic SDLC.
I’m also interviewing three groups of experts:
The pioneers who are building autonomous software factories
The engineering leaders who are managing agentic adoption in organizations large and small
The dev tool founders who are solving specific problems that impact agentic adoption
And I’m building what I write about: my own multi-agent orchestrator with durable execution, configurable pipelines, and a compounding memory system. I’m moving my role from instigator to advisor as the agents take on more of the operations for the business.
This is where I share what I’m learning from all of them.
About me
I’m Peter Bell. I help CTOs scale AI adoption across the engineering org. I’ve built and led engineering organizations, designed distributed systems, and taught Data Science at Columbia Business School. For fifteen years I’ve been connecting engineering leaders through communities, conferences, and salons. I host the CTO Hour for O’Reilly, facilitate the executive summits at KubeCon for CNCF, and I’m writing the O’Reilly book on Scaling AI Adoption in Engineering.
About the principles
I believe:
Agentic engineering is the future of software development, and it will reshape organizations, not just tooling
This transition requires hands-on leadership from CTOs. You cannot delegate it to your head of platform
If you are not getting great results from AI, it is you, not the models. The investment is in learning to specify, verify, and continually iterate
Less is more. I will only post when there is something to say, and I will maximize information density so you do not need your AI to summarize it for you
The biggest asset any engineering leader has is the trusted community they contribute to and learn from.
About the format
Frequent insights, occasional deep dives. Most posts are designed to give you one actionable idea in under two minutes. The deep dives (like the Agentic Org series and the upcoming Factories series) are for when you have time to think.
About the community
Engineering leadership for the agentic age.
AI isn’t just changing how code gets written. It’s changing how engineering organizations work. The people who can help you the most are the senior engineering leaders making the same bets at the same scale. Gather is a free, invite-only peer community for senior engineering leaders navigating the agentic transition.
We convene intimate groups for: Founding CTOs, Startup CTOs, CTOs at Scale and broader gatherings for DirectorPlus leaders. Monthly events in NYC and the Bay Area, plus online (more cities coming soon). We invite leaders who are generous, curious, and honest about what they don’t know. This Substack is where we share what the community learns.
If you would like to contribute to the conversation, consider applying to join us. If you just want the insights, subscribe. Everything here is free. Probably always will be.
Paid founding memberships appreciated but not required. They help keep me going with caffeine and tokens :)
