I'm back!

Not working is HARD!

I just wanted to apologize that I’ve been in a black hole for the last few weeks. As I mentioned in a previous article, I really feel that I can’t afford to work anymore, except in dire circumstances.

The TL;DR is that I hope AI is not going to take my job for a while. But I know that somebody using AI will. As such, I can’t afford to simply do work. There isn’t enough leverage. The only thing worth doing is building and tuning the systems that will do the work. And I’ve been working hard on that for the last few weeks.

I’m still not happy with all the loops and I’ve still got a lot of taste to encode. But the systems are finally coming online and getting to the point where they are almost as good as me. And I’m hoping that by September, they’ll be better than me at most of the things I do - especially with a Fable glow up this week while it’s available on the max plans.

I will be breaking this substack into multiple newsletters to reflect the different dimensions of my work so you can pick and choose. There will be channels for engineering leadership in the age of AI (including this substack), agentic engineering and software factory design, solopreneurship in the age of AI, and some occasional musings on the broader changes I expect to see in society over the next few years - I’ll share more details as they all launch.

I’ve also been interviewing a bunch of AI thought leaders and CTOs for the O’Reilly book on Scaling AI Adoption in Engineering (should be copy complete in July and available as an early release digitally shortly after and then as a book around Thanksgiving). I’ll start to drop those interviews next week.

I’m moving the Gather.dev events to quarterly (the 2026 calendar is live here). There will be can’t miss intimate quarterly afternoon forums for Scaling CTOs (series B+, 50-250 engineers) and CTOs at Scale (orgs of 250 - 10,000 engineers) where we’ll dig deep into what is and isn’t working, sharing insights and experiences that won’t be available elsewhere. These will be followed by evening events for Startup CTOs ($1m+ raised) and DirectorPlus (managers of managers at companies with ~50 - 10,000 engineers) with speakers and a room full of engineering leaders building or adopting dark factories. They will all be intimate (~20 participants for the forums and ~50 for the evening events) - free, invite only. So if you want to save a slot in NY or SF, you should probably sign up now (I’ll ping you a month before to confirm attendance so we can open up slots to the waitlisters).

I’ll also be spending a lot more time focused on advisory work. For $5k - $15k a month companies will have access to a pipeline of good practices and recommendations for everything from strategic positioning to stakeholder and change management to practical advice on context stores, pipelines and compounding systems. I’ll only have a few slots, and next week I’m going to start offering them to 30,000 of my closest friends, so feel free to drop me a line if you’d like to audit/benchmark/evaluate/plan or accelerate your AI in the SDLC initiatives - I’ll probably only take on 5-8 clients so I’m hoping to have a waitlist by August.

It’s good to be back! (Talking of which, come on Fable :) ).