A mobile app, past its usefulness, was days from being phased out. One email reversed the decision. No discussion. No input from engineering. This is what happens when decision-making drifts too far from the work.
The AI wave is here, and the industry is already splitting into two: those adapting fast and those falling behind. The gap is widening quickly.
Founders juggle endless demands, investors, sales, suppliers, and employees, all while building the plane mid-flight. But with engineering often being your biggest expense, there's one responsibility you can't delegate: ensuring your team builds the right thing.
The return of multitasking, but not as we knew it. Running multiple Claude Code instances simultaneously isn't the context-switching productivity killer we've been warned about for years; it's orchestration
CTOs often come from engineering backgrounds and, particularly when newly promoted, tend to focus on what they know best, the technology. While this is understandable given their previous success, technology is rarely the hardest part of the CTO role.
Micromanagement rarely starts with bad intent. It usually starts with silence. When nobody knows what you are working on, meetings multiply, trust erodes, and focus disappears. This piece shows how clear, boring communication is your best defence.
If you believe what you see on LinkedIn, startups don't need employees anymore, real founders just have agents building their companies. You write a prompt, fire off the agent, and wait for customers. In reality, you get a vague workflow that produces a mediocre demo at best.
For small teams without a designer, v0 is a game-changer. The cost justifies itself by letting you explore and validate ideas in minutes rather than days.
I switched from Cursor's BugBot ($40/month) to Claude Code for code reviews. Setup is straightforward in VS Code, and Claude's bug detection has been notably better. While it still flags null reference checks like most AI reviewers, the difference in catching actual bugs is significant.
