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 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 cost of the quick fix
The quick fix isn't cheaper. It's cheaper today. Bram Devries traces how deferred fixes compound into emergencies, and argues that naming the trade-off out loud is the only way to break the cycle.
Your limit will reset at 12pm
Half of today's AI best practices are coping mechanisms for temporary scarcity, not timeless engineering insights. Geoffrey Dhuyvetters traces the arc from SMS bundles to token limits, and argues the price curve only goes one direction.
The SaaS audit bingo card: insights after auditing 180+ SaaS companies
After auditing 180+ 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.
Your Claude Code is burning through tokens: here's how to fix it
Five idle plugins can burn 55,000 tokens before you type a word. Here's how to diagnose token consumption in Claude Code and cut overhead through plugin management, profiles, and context hygiene.
Agentic engineering is a bottleneck
The standard AI-assisted dev loop has created a new bottleneck: us. Peter Eysermans describes how deterministic orchestration via n8n, with GitHub as shared memory, gets the human off the loop without sacrificing quality.
You're reviewing the wrong file
When an AI agent gets a requirement wrong, the mistake lives in the test assertions, not the implementation. Domain knowledge catches it, not coding skill.
Be a lobster
The processes that got you here will eventually constrain you. Like a lobster shedding its shell, scaling companies must periodically dismantle what worked intentionally, not in panic. Constraints aren’t a failure; they’re proof you’ve outgrown your current structure.
Who teaches the next generation?
AI has removed the junior work that used to build software engineers. Seven other industries faced the same disruption and didn't agree on an answer.
Stop calling it vibe coding
"Vibe coding" has become shorthand for bad engineering to some people, but does the label hold up? This post unpacks how a playful term coined by Andrej Karpathy became a verdict, and why that's costing teams more than they realise.
Beyond prompting: read, verify, implement, learn
LLMs generate code fast, but knowledge debt accumulates quickly. The fix is living documentation, and this post shows how to turn your LLM into the partner that maintains it automatically.
Nobody learned a city from a map
The fastest way to learn agentic development is to stop studying it: move in, extract repeatable patterns into skills, and reflect to compound.
Hosting shared document services - WOPI
Ever wanted to build your own Google Docs-style document service? This post introduces WOPI, the open protocol that lets web applications embed Office document editing directly in the browser, while keeping your app in control of storage and permissions.
The disconnect between management and engineering
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.
Bots and Boundaries: Two problems, one policy (Part 3)
In part three, we look at both sides of the AI contribution debate. A working patch, real demand, never submitted, rejected because AI was involved. But maintainers are unpaid volunteers, and AI halved the cost of contributing without touching the cost of review. Both sides have a point.
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