The CTO Circle Newsletter · June 3, 2026
Hey, this is Marco from CTO Circle. My goal is to deliver the most value in the fewest words, in the simplest way.
Please let me know what you think and how I can improve it. Just reply, I read every message.
In this issue
The last CTO lunch in Barcelona before summer, the cost of over-engineering AI workflows, the launches that matter, community talks, and open engineering roles.
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Software built with intention
540 works alongside CTOs and product teams to build software that holds up: code your team can own, architectures that survive the next challenge, and delivery you don't have to babysit.
Embedded dev teams, technical consulting, and training. Pragmatic, opinionated, and in it for the long run.
Their CTO, Gorka Moreno, is writing a series on what AI is actually changing in how we build software: the developer's role, progressive delegation, agentic workflows, evals, and cost observability. Read the series.
Next community events
June 22 · Itnig, Barcelona
Last CTO Lunch in Barcelona before summer
CTO networking, tapas, and short talks from engineering leaders. A relaxed way to close the season before the summer break.
Apply to attend. Sponsored by Tinybird and Auth0.
Short opinionated trend
The cost of being the innovators
Last week I wrote about creating your own playbook for AI engineering. Teams should look at what others are doing, experiment internally, and build their own way of working.
Then a friend watched a video about an AI harness playbook and spent the whole week redesigning and rebuilding their harness and workflow, trying prompt structures and formalizing an internal process. They are a four-person company.
This has a cost: one hidden by the AI hype, and one you may pay again when the next thing comes out or someone publishes a new way of working on Hacker News.
Do not be an innovator if AI workflow design is not your core business. Experimenting is good. Turning your engineering team into a permanent AI strategy committee is not.
It is easier to be an early adopter, or part of the early majority, adopting concepts once they have been proven in similar environments. Yes, experiment, but do not confuse experimenting with endlessly searching for the perfect workflow.
News, reads & launches
Microsoft unveiled seven homegrown AI models, spanning reasoning, coding, image, voice, and transcription and reducing its reliance on OpenAI and Anthropic.
Anthropic filed to go public in a blockbuster year for IPOs.
Nvidia is bringing its RTX Spark Arm chip to Windows PCs, while Intel is betting on cheaper, cooler AI chips.
Factorial raised $150M at a $2.5B valuation, becoming one of Europe's top 20 most valuable scale-ups.
The speed of prototyping in the age of AI. AI moves engineers from idea to working project in hours while raising the importance of specs, delegation, and human judgment.
Is this sustainable? AI has made senior engineers dramatically more powerful, but shifted the bottleneck to alignment, mentoring, and thinking time.
From the community
We uploaded our first CTO Circle Talk: Javi Moscardó on the phases of AI adoption in companies, including the Q&A from our Madrid event.
New here? Join the Slack community and introduce yourself.
Open engineering leadership roles
That's it for today. Let me know whether this issue gave you enough value, reply and tell me what to cut or add.
Best,
Marco