A reading list for CIOs

If you're skeptical

You've watched a dozen hype cycles come and go, and your instinct is to wait this one out. That instinct has served you well, and some of what you're being sold right now really is overhyped. But the gap between the marketing and what an experienced engineer does with these tools is enormous — bigger than anything Steve has seen in forty years of writing code. The noise is real. What it's drowning out is a genuine step change, and that's the part the skeptics tend to miss. Two pieces to start with:

• 2024

  The Death of the Junior Developer

  What AI coding tools do to the bottom rung of the career ladder.

• 2023

  Cheating Is All You Need

  The early, emphatic case that coding assistants were a step change, not a toy.

Or skip the arguments and audit the record: a scorecard of calls Steve has made since 2004, graded by an AI with the misses left in.

If you're going too fast

You signed the Copilot contract, set adoption targets, mandated AI-assisted PRs, and the dashboards are green. But adoption is not transformation. Transformation is what happens to your org chart, your review process, and the way work gets allocated — and none of that shows up in a seat-license dashboard. Moving fast is the right instinct. Just make sure you're moving fast on the right thing.

• 2026

  Vibe Maintainer

  Maintenance is the new bottleneck.

• 2025

  The AI Vampire

  Cost-versus-value at scale.

If you've been piloting for a year

You ran the pilot. The engineers were excited in the demo and quiet a month later. Now it's two quarters on, there's no production lift anyone can point to, and the steering committee wants to know what happened. Nothing was wrong with the pilot. The problem was the organization it landed in. This is the most common place to be stuck, and the diagnosis is almost always cultural — which means more tools won't fix it.

• 2012

  Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus

  The conservative/liberal axis of engineering culture — central to thinking about why pilots stall.

• 2011

  Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

  Why most internal initiatives fail to compound into a platform.

• 2006

  Good Agile, Bad Agile

  The case against process-for-its-own-sake, from inside Google's early engineering culture.

Get in touch

If any of these sounds like your org, that's what Steve is brought in to fix. He offers single- and multi-day engagements, tailored to where you're stuck: keynotes and company-wide talks, bespoke meetings with leaders and skeptics, and Vibe Coding workshops with Gene Kim. The Services page has the formats.

Book an engagement