The peloton problem
Senior engineers carry the front of every decision, every code review, every on-call shift. The peloton runs best when roles rotate. When the star eventually leaves, someone else needs to know what wind feels like.
The blog · since 2015
Insights for founders,
CTOs & investors.
Essays, playbooks and field notes from our CTOs, architects and leads. Written for people shipping real product.
Featured articles
What will the state of AI be like by this time next year?
Pricing strategies in the era of AI: why hourly billing no longer works
5 red flags for VCs when planning to invest in Seed or Series A companies
SaaS due diligence report: 12 learnings for founders that want to secure their next funding round
Things we do in our first weeks as Fractional CTO
Latest posts
The peloton problem
Senior engineers carry the front of every decision, every code review, every on-call shift. The peloton runs best when roles rotate. When the star eventually leaves, someone else needs to know what wind feels like.
Claude up front, Codex in the back
Using Claude Code as the orchestrator and Codex as the engine gives you the best of both tools: Claude's UI, Codex's depth, and minimal Claude token spend. The economics only work when the task is big enough to justify two layers.
From syntax tinkering to systems thinking
The bottleneck in software engineering has shifted from typing to understanding. As AI handles implementation, engineers who thrive will be those who recognise patterns, curate guardrails, and connect technical decisions to business outcomes.
Building a slide deck with pencil.dev and Claude Design
A head-to-head of pencil.dev vs Claude Design on the same markdown input. Claude Design produced the more polished deck and handled speaker notes; pencil.dev still wins for iterative UI work where direct manipulation matters.
Courage as a service
AI is making the knowledge side of consulting cheaper by the day. Teams still avoid the legacy system. The gap is not expertise. It is the structural courage to act on what everyone already knows.
Stop letting documentation rot
Five types of documentation, five different AI leverage stories. The question isn’t whether to involve AI in your docs; it’s where each type belongs and how much maintenance you can hand off.
Pairing with a yes-machine
Pairing with an AI feels like pair programming. It isn't. There's one prior in the room, and it's trained to agree. This post makes the case for mob programming and spec-driven development as the structural fix.
Show me the way: engineering demo 101
Engineering demos fail when they present what was built instead of why it matters. A practical guide to leading with business impact, showing the happy path, and translating technical work into terms your audience actually uses.
Five ways to fail
Errors don't just happen; they land somewhere. Validation, generic, idempotent ignore, warning log, or Sentry: each routes failure to a different audience. Get the routing wrong and either engineers go blind to real bugs, or state corrupts silently.
A warm welcome, straight from my desk — №1
This is the first edition of my rebranded newsletter, straight from my desk. Every other week, I'll write something about what we'
The AI skills gap
In 40+ interviews, senior engineers from major banks and consultancies showed strong backgrounds but little real AI fluency. No RAG, no agent frameworks. The gap isn't about skill, it's about exposure.
Hermes: the agent that doesn't quit when you close your laptop
Hermes is an open-source AI agent that runs on a server, remembers across sessions, and builds reusable skills over time. The shift it represents: AI moving from something you summon to something that runs.
Building a customer support AI agent that learns before it speaks
A customer support AI agent built in stages: shadow mode first, internal notes second, auto-send only after the data earns it. A walkthrough of the architecture, the knowledge base design, and the lessons that held up.
Architecture always leaks
Auditing data-heavy companies reveals the same pattern: asynchronous data processing crammed into the synchronous web stack. The contention shows in performance, delivery, and team dynamics. Isolation fixes all three.
Your network isn’t as safe as you think
Cheap consumer devices from Amazon and BestBuy ship with factory-installed malware and botnet software. The Zero Trust principle isn’t paranoia; it’s the only safe assumption for any network you don’t fully control.
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