ShiftMag

At a CTO Craft Dinner in Toronto, I sat down with engineering leaders from more than a dozen tech companies and asked where AI has actually landed. The free-for-all is over and we need to be realistic.

What economist Charles Goodhart said in 1975 is completely applicable in 2026: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Developers share how they handle deadlines, pressure, and team communication - and why small white lies sometimes help engineering teams keep moving.

Watching AI product evolution from the sidelines makes you feel like things are going fast, but according to Anthropic's Gian Segato, that might not be the best metric.

A CTO with 20 years of experience through multiple tech shifts sees layoffs not as an AI effect, but as a correction after an unsustainable hiring boom. He sees AI as a reset: an opportunity for strong junior engineers, and a wake-up call for senior developers facing an existential shift in how they stay relevant.

This team was shipping production code at the same time as the MCP specification was taking shape. That is the reality of working with a technology that was evolving in real time.

When dozens of developers share the same environment and Git repository, testing changes quickly becomes chaotic. Here's how Kubernetes solves that.

There is a gap most engineering leaders prefer not to explore: the distance between the clarity they believe they're projecting and the confusion their teams actually experience.

The case for cutting junior engineers looks airtight at the CFO level, but wrong from every other perspective.

Twenty developers got real about their jobs: the rush of shipping something that actually works, the way a fat paycheck can make you stay longer than you probably should, and the slow death of sitting through another meeting that should've been an email.

At Devoxx UK, I spoke with Trisha Gee - author and one of the most recognized voices in the Java space - about what really happens when teams lean heavily on AI. Her take was far darker than the conference hype.

Everything you think is non-negotiable in software development, Sander Hoogendoorn's team quietly dropped - and nothing broke.

ShiftMag Insightful engineering content & community

CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt

AI generates larger pull requests. Larger pull requests bring more bugs.

The Small Lies Developers Tell to Keep Work Moving

Gian Segato, Anthropic: “AI Products Are a Lagging Indicator of Growth”

20 Year Old Unicorn Goes AI-First Without Mass AI Layoffs

Your API Is Already a Hidden MCP Server, You Just Need to Discover It

Solving the Multi-Contributor Challenge with Kubernetes and Ephemeral Environments

Engineering Leaders, You Should Be Worried If Your Team Isn’t Pushing Back

Don’t Hire Juniors to Write Code, Hire Them to Become Seniors

We Asked 20 Developers Why They Really Got Into Tech. It Wasn’t the Money.

Trisha Gee: AI Won’t Fix Your Broken Pipeline – It Will Break It Faster

Killing PRs was the easy part. Now Technical Death Keeps the CTO Up.