Leadership in Tech
Leadership in Tech
#360 – November 01, 2026
ambition grows best when shared with people who take each other seriously
Room for ambition
3 minutes by Karri Saarinen
Ambition grows best when shared with people who take each other seriously. Greatness is less about beating others and more about developing your own abilities to their fullest. It means asking more of yourself in things that matter, whether in work, family, or community. The real question is not who wins, but how much you can contribute.
A Pile of MCP Connectors Is Not a Context Engine
sponsored by Unblocked
Your team connected Slack, Jira and GitHub over MCP, and engineers still spend their time steering agents to the right answer. This article looks at why: connectors fetch from one tool at a time, so every agent stitches the pieces together itself, trusts the first doc that looks right, and adds a search to your token bill each time. See what changes when a context engine sits on top of your connectors: the same coding task finished 83% faster at 48% lower cost.
The mythical man-month in the age of AI
1 minute by Jan van den Berg
Brooks's Law states that adding people to a late project makes it later. AI agents remove some old bottlenecks like onboarding and meetings, but the core problem remains. Sequential tasks stay sequential, and someone still needs to review outputs, catch errors, and keep everything aligned. More agents with unclear goals just produce the wrong result faster.
Do you need formal authority to lead?
21 minutes by Andi Roberts
Leadership does not require a management title. Anyone can lead by helping others tackle hard problems, and in complex organisations, this kind of contribution often matters more than formal authority. Credibility, trust, and relationships determine whose input people actually follow. That said, clear decision rights still matter when negotiation alone cannot resolve competing priorities.
Don’t let fear drive your decisions
10 minutes by Yew Jin Lim
Staying calm under pressure is a skill worth building, not just a feel-good idea. Fear hijacks decision making and narrows your focus, while calm lets you see the full picture. You can build this through three areas: knowing your values and defining what is enough for your soul, training your mind through meditation and cutting out noise, and caring for your body through sleep, movement, and time alone.
The test suite is the new code review
14 minutes by Allen Hutchison
Agent-driven development has made code review nearly instant, but test suites haven't kept pace. Running a full test suite now blocks merges in a way it never did when human review took hours. The solution is splitting monorepos into small, focused repositories so agents can hold the entire codebase in context and tests finish in minutes rather than thirteen. Each service gets a real interface boundary, keeping hidden coupling from replacing visible complexity.
Let AI Agents Handle Routine Development Work
sponsored by SuperPlane
SuperPlane 1.0 is an open-source software factory that lets AI agents fully automate routine development work, from backlog issues to verified, review-ready pull requests. Your team defines the rules, agents handle the coding and checks, and engineers decide what gets merged. Spend less time coordinating routine tasks and more time on engineering decisions.
And the most popular article from the last issue was: