The CTO Substack

The CTO’s Crisis Cadence

A crisis is a bandwidth problem. Your engineers have too little and your CEO has too much. Your job is not to fix the system. Your job is to manage the…

Jun 11 • Etienne de Bruin

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Etienne’s Letter: From Pushkin to GPT

We talk about AI models as if they arrived from nowhere. They didn’t. They are the industrial-scale descendant of a 113-year-old technique for…

Jun 7 • Etienne de Bruin

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The CTO’s Refactor

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Jun 2 • Etienne de Bruin

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May 2026

The CTO’s Comprehension Debt

The work doesn’t disappear when you forward the AI’s summary. It moves.

May 29 • Etienne de Bruin

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The CTO’s Extinction Event

The title on my own job spec started feeling archaic. So I went looking for what the CTOs leveling up are actually doing differently.

May 3 • Etienne de Bruin

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April 2026

The CTO’s Incoming Storms

Let me name the six conversations I’m watching land on CTOs right now, and the stance I’d want you holding in each one.

Apr 16 • Etienne de Bruin

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The CTO’s Entropy War

The second law of thermodynamics is coming for your codebase. AI just handed it a flamethrower.

Apr 9 • Etienne de Bruin

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March 2026

The CTO’s New Engineering Ladder

How to build a performance ladder that actually means something when everyone in the company writes code

Mar 12 • Etienne de Bruin

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February 2026

The CTO’s Next Customer

How the zero-interface revolution will make your SaaS product obsolete — unless you rebuild it for the right user.

Feb 11 • Etienne de Bruin

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January 2026

The CTO’s Token Treasury

What every technology leader needs to know about the fundamental unit powering AI

Jan 29 • Etienne de Bruin

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The CTO’s Methodological Pivot

How AI is forcing CTOs to rethink everything they believed about Agile and Waterfall

Jan 23 • Etienne de Bruin

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The CTO’s AI Provider Predicament

Why getting cozy with your AI coding vendor might be the most expensive decision you make this year

Jan 13 • Etienne de Bruin

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