Working Surface weekly · 12 October to 18 October 2026
How we review plans, not pull requests
Giant Swarm moved human review to the plan, and five more pieces from this week do the same: teams write down the plan, the question and the assumptions before AI agents build, where someone else can dispute them.
 
   
Engineering
Spec-driven development: how we review plans, not pull requests
“We moved human review from the code diff to the plan for what we're about to build.”
Dominik Schmidle · Giant Swarm
Product
The Roadmap Is a Lie
“Coherence has become cheap. Evidence has not.”
Petros Bountis · The Socratic Leadership
Product
PRD or Prototype: Which should start with when it comes to building products with AI?
“But speed does not turn generated decisions into product intent.”
Ravi Mehta · Top 1% Builder with Ravi
Engineering
Your engineering strategy has a new failure mode
“AI can improve the metric used to justify a strategy while making the overall delivery system more constrained.”
Robert Kimani · LeadDev
Product
Why executive judgment decides who wins with AI
“People must own unwritten decisions the first time they're made.”
Tom Holbourn and Alexander Moore · Thoughtworks
Wevy, the site's clerk robot, winks
Wevy's quote of the week
Hello hello! One line from this week that I'd read aloud before every demo:
“Demos are fine for selling an idea. They are poor at changing a decision.”
Shipped this week
5 of the 10 releases logged this week. All releases
6 of the 28 links added this week. More on this theme · All links