The CTO’s Survival Guide to AI in the SDLC
Iterating towards an agentic SDLC
The playbook’s broken. Every assumption you had about team structure, hiring, and how software gets built is being rewritten by AI. This newsletter helps you figure out what to do about it. You’ll get:
Interviews with CTOs at all scales, dev tool founders and domain experts to gain insights into what’s working and to understand how the scale and context of your org will impact the good practices to adopt.
Benchmarks based on thousands of conversations with CTOs within the Gather.dev communities.
Tutorials for upping your personal agentic AI game - this is a transition you can’t just delegate and manage through.
Analysis of trending topics to help you to understand the implications for engineering orgs.
Insights to help you manage and accelerate AI adoption across your org. Everything from good practices for building agentic harnesses to the implications of AI on hiring, change management, org structure and managing stakeholder expectations.
These insights come from:
Hosting monthly CTO salons in person and online at Gather.dev
Writing the O’Reilly book on Scaling AI Adoption in Engineering
Facilitating the executive summits for CNCF at KubeCon twice a year.
Building my own agentic organization.
If you’d like a single, authoritative source focused on responsibly accelerating AI adoption within the SDLC, make sure to subscribe to keep up to date with the journey!
Where to start
Have you spent at least a half day heads down in Claude code or similar since November 2025? If not, you need to before anything else will make sense.
If you’re still primarily using a keyboard to transfer your thoughts to your computer, fix that now.
Want to get a sense of the style? Here’s an opinionated take on AI layoffs and the SaaSpocolypse.
A primer (with examples) on how to build a software factory (agentic engineering for the SDLC).