Yannick De Pauw

Yannick De Pauw

Making sure the people are happy, things look pretty and products reach a greater audience, is why this people & marketing manager sets his alarm clock every day.

CTO

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.

AI

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.

AI

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.

Engineering

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.

AI

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.

AI

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.

Engineering

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.

AI

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 150+ technical audits.

AI

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.

AI

How to introduce AI coding agents into your engineering team

AI coding agents draft code, write tests, and open pull requests autonomously. This guide covers the tool landscape, readiness signals, a phased rollout plan, and the team dynamics that make or break adoption.

AI

AI code review tools: what works, what doesn't, and how to set it up

AI code review catches what humans miss and misses what humans catch. This guide compares the tools, shows what each catches, and walks through setup without replacing human judgment.

Leadership

Your startup does not need more engineers, it needs fewer mistakes

Hiring to fix velocity often multiplies your problems. Reduce avoidable mistakes first: tighten decision-making, align product and engineering, and put foundations in place that make a small team dangerous in the right way.

Leadership

Why freedom beats control: building a proper remote culture

Building a thriving remote-first culture takes more than allowing people to work from home. Discover how hiring for ownership, embracing asynchronous work, and saying no to misaligned projects creates a sustainable remote future.

madewithlove

Legacy vs technical debt: how investors can spot hidden risks in software products

What can investors do about legacy code to prevent your startup from failure? What is the difference between legacy and technical debt?

AI

Your next hire will use AI in their technical test. Obviously.

As AI becomes a standard part of every developer’s toolkit, tech hiring needs to evolve from policing its use to understanding how candidates apply, evaluate, and collaborate with it.

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