Technical Leadership

Many founders think a CTO is just a CTO. I do not think that is true. I have seen many startups look for the wrong kind of technical leader. Usually this happens because the founder knows they need technical leadership, but they do not clearly understand what kind of technical leadership their company actually needs right now. That difference matters. If you are a non-technical founder, maybe you raised some money, maybe you have an idea, and now you are looking for someone to lead the technical side of the company. It is natural to say, “We need a CTO.” ...

Imagine you’re a CTO at a company with a government contract. Your product runs on Claude from Anthropic. Monday morning, you get a call: Claude is banned from all government systems. Now what? Two Very Different Mornings If you built your AI layer as a plug-and-play abstraction, you’re annoyed, but you’re fine. You swap the provider, run your regression tests, push to staging, move to prod. That’s it. A day’s work. Maybe two. ...

People say, “I am vibe-coding. Therefore, I am a software engineer.” This is like saying, “I can ride a bike, so I can drive a car.” Both have wheels. Both can move forward, right? Here’s what I’ll say: try merging onto a highway on a bicycle. You’ll learn fast what’s missing. Mapping the Territory Today I want to place vibe-coding, coding, regular coding, and software engineering onto the same map. So you’ll know when to pedal and when to drive. ...

Most developers ask AI tools to write a function or fix a bug. That’s fine, but here’s the cheat code I discovered: treat AI like a developer on your team. When I do that, everything changes. The Pattern I Discovered I use AI tools every day in my professional work and personal projects. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini; I subscribe to all of them. Over time, I’ve noticed a pattern. These tools excel at zooming in. By that, I mean they’re excellent at specific tasks: generating code, writing tests, refactoring functions, etc… . We all know this. ...

“So, what kind of engineer are you?” “I’m a Python engineer.” Every time I hear this, I cringe a little. Not because Python isn’t amazing—it absolutely is. But because somewhere along the way, we’ve started defining ourselves by our tools instead of our craft. I’m sure you’ve heard it too: “I am an AWS engineer,” “I am a React developer,” as if the tool has become their entire professional identity. ...