#37 | Sunday reads for EMs

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

👋 Hey, it’s Stephane. Every Sunday I share with you my favourite reads of the week. To accelerate your growth see: AI Interview Coach | 50 Notion Templates | The EM’s Field Guide | CodeCrafters | Get Hired as an EM | 1:1 Coaching

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Building An Elite AI Engineering Culture In 2026 (Chris Roth)

tl;dr: AI is a multiplier, not an equalizer: Taste × Discipline × Leverage. Senior engineers get 5x the productivity gains from AI tools vs juniors, and PR review times jumped 91% even as output increased. Specific practices from Linear, Stripe, Cursor, and Vercel: spec-driven development before prompting, stacked PRs to solve the AI-generated review crisis, AGENTS.md as a curated (not auto-generated) team artifact, vertical slice architecture for AI-friendliness, cycle time replacing story points, and the Design Engineer role dissolving traditional handoffs.