#26 | Sunday reads for EMs

My favourite reads of the week to make your Sunday a little more inspiring.

Dec 14, 2025

👋 Hey, it’s Stephane. This is a new series in which every Sunday I share with you my favourite reads of the week. To accelerate your growth see: The EM’s Field Guide | CodeCrafters | Get Hired as an EM | 1:1 Coaching

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Facilitating AI adoption at Imprint (Will Larson)

tl;dr: Will Larson shares deep operational notes from 18 months of internal AI/agent rollout. The key insight is that effective AI adoption is a blend of three things most orgs separate: domain context on the problem, hands-on AI tooling experience, and old-fashioned IT provisioning (and this is objectively harder at larger companies where those live in different orgs).

Using LLMs at Oxide (Bryan Cantrill)

tl;dr: The taxonomy of use cases is genuinely useful: LLMs as readers/researchers (high value, low risk), LLMs as editors (valuable late in the creative process, perilous early), LLMs as writers (mostly avoid), and LLMs as programmers (useful for throwaway/experimental code, risky for production systems). This is the thoughtful policy doc most companies haven’t written yet.

Why I Ignore The Spotlight as a Staff Engineer (Lalit Maganti)

tl;dr: A Senior Staff at Google makes the case for “stewardship over spotlight” as an alternative Staff+ career strategy, but crucially notes this only works in certain environments (infra/devtools, profitable companies that can sustain long-term investment). The Bigtrace case study illustrates how staying with a problem space for years enables systemic innovation that team-hoppers can’t achieve.

Optimize for Momentum (Murat Demirbas)

tl;dr: Touching a project daily compounds progress. Use LLMs to break down large problems into subtasks and draft something mediocre that annoys you into fixing it. Design workflows around staying in motion rather than waiting for clarity.

The 25 Micro-Habits of High-Impact Managers

tl;dr: A crowdsourced listicle with some useful tactics buried in the volume. Worth skimming for a few habits to adopt, but don’t expect non-obvious frameworks - this is mostly aggregated conventional wisdom presented accessibly.