#42 | Sunday reads for EMs

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

Stephane Moreau

Apr 26, 2026

👋 Hey, it’s Stephane. Every Sunday I share with you my favourite reads of the week.

To accelerate your growth see:

Paid subscribers get 50 Notion Templates, The EM’s Field Guide, and access to the complete archive. Subscribe now.

Red-Teaming Your Strategy (Mike Fisher)

tl;dr: A Southwest flight landed at the wrong airport because the pilots stopped checking. The same thing happens in leadership: teams move from data to intuition too quickly and confuse confidence with correctness. The fix: build systems that force you to keep verifying, especially when you feel most certain.

High Amplitude Disagreeableness

tl;dr: Startup people don’t disagree more often than others - they just disagree harder when it matters, and this post reframes that as a measurable trait (amplitude vs. frequency) rather than a personality flaw to manage around.

My AI Workflow Without Losing My Skills (Marc G Gauthier)

tl;dr: Mix vibe-coding, manual coding, and AI-assisted coding. The rule of thumb is reviewing 100% of AI code and writing roughly 50% manually, with agents reserved for “Omega Messes” (well-isolated, heavily testable chunks).

AI-Assisted Engineering Q1 2026 Impact Report (Justin Reock)

tl;dr: Two structural shifts: engineering managers using AI daily are now shipping 4x more code than six months ago (player-coach is back), and junior engineers have just overtaken Staff+ engineers in weekly time saved (4.9 vs 4.8 hours).

Why can’t they just...? Revisited (Lara Hogan)

tl;dr: A reissue of Hogan’s 2017 piece, updated with AI mandates as the running example - the question “why can’t they just X” almost never has the answer the asker assumes (it’s rarely lack of awareness, urgency, or willingness).