Token spend is the new cloud bill
The token bill for an AI agent is the visible 10 to 30% of what it costs. Review, supervision, rework and ownership make up the rest, and unlike a salary, almost nobody forecasts it.
Yannick De Pauw
How to choose a fractional CTO in Belgium: a guide for non-technical founders
A practical guide to evaluating fractional CTO providers in Belgium: the three criteria that matter most, how the four provider types differ, what an engagement should cost, and when a full-time hire is the better call.
What's in a technical due diligence report?
A good technical due diligence report is smaller than you expect, separates fact-checked observations from labelled judgement, and answers the specific questions your deal depends on. No score. The real test: does it change what you do on Monday morning?
Documentation has a new reader and why it should belong inside the codebase
AI is now a reader of your documentation. When context lives outside the repository, gaps appear and assumptions creep in. Moving documentation closer to the code makes the system easier to reason about, for people and for machines.
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.
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.
The CTO as prisoner
CTOs who built their company's survival by doing everything can't escape that role by scheduling a holiday. Moving from doing to enabling is a skill and identity shift at once. One thing handed off permanently is where the exit starts.
Taste is the moat
When AI closes the execution gap, taste becomes the differentiator. Curation, judgement, and the willingness to say “not this” compound over time in ways that models can’t replicate.
The authenticity tax
AI-generated content has made polished writing look suspicious. The deeper cost is the thinking you skip when you outsource the words that define your position.
The SaaS audit bingo card: insights after auditing 190+ SaaS companies
After auditing 190+ SaaS companies, the same patterns keep showing up: a CTO who does everything, documentation nobody updates, a backlog from 2019. Here's what the bingo card looks like, and what AI is changing about it.
I'm using my engineering colleagues as my personal agents
A couple of months ago, I was copy-pasting prompts into ChatGPT. Now I'm shipping features, running tests, managing branches, and keeping documentation alive, with a team of agents doing the heavy lifting. All by myself.
Why AI makes engineering teams smaller, but not simpler
AI is changing what small teams can ship, boilerplate gone, prototypes faster, experimentation cheaper. But lower costs of building don't mean lower costs of building the wrong thing. It just means you can do it faster.
The hidden cost of multiple repositories
Go for one codebase or multiple repositories? A question multiple CTOs and technical founders have asked. It can be a surprisingly expensive decision nobody warns you about.
The CTO's guide to AI adoption strategy
AI adoption fails when treated as a tool rollout. This guide covers the decision framework, team dynamics, economics, and mistakes from 190+ technical audits.
A guide to vibe coding vs AI-assisted development
Vibe coding or AI-assisted development? The choice isn't binary, but getting it wrong at the wrong stage will cost you. This piece breaks down when to embrace speed over architecture, when to take back control, and why the best teams don't pick sides.