# Blog Writing on fractional CTO work, AI-first product engineering, software delivery, and product leadership. Practical essays for founders and technical leaders who need to make better decisions before the code, the team, or the roadmap gets expensive. ## Posts - [You Can't Reverse Engineer Taste](/blog/you-cant-reverse-engineer-taste/) - Published: July 10, 2026 - Description: AI can help you imitate what already works, but developing your own point of view requires living, making things, getting lost, and trusting your eye. - Tags: AI, Creativity, Product Building - [Is AI the End of Engineering, or Just the Beginning?](/blog/is-ai-the-end-of-engineering-or-just-the-beginning/) - Published: June 27, 2026 - Description: AI is eating some old software work, but it is also creating a new category of engineering: turning half-working AI systems into durable business tools. - Tags: AI, Engineering, Product Engineering - [The Problem With Abundance](/blog/the-problem-with-abundance/) - Published: June 26, 2026 - Description: AI may make digital things cheaper and easier to produce, but the scarce things people actually want will still be controlled, priced, and protected. - Tags: AI, Opinion, Society - [Cracking the AI Code Interview](/blog/cracking-the-ai-code-interview/) - Published: June 17, 2026 - Description: The engineering interview has to change. In the AI era, the work is not just writing code faster. It is judgment, cost, quality, communication, and knowing what should be built at all. - Tags: AI, Engineering, Hiring - [I Don't Need More Horsepower. I Need More Road.](/blog/i-dont-need-more-horsepower-i-need-more-road/) - Published: June 17, 2026 - Description: AI has made software teams faster than the feedback loop. The harder business problem now is growth, trust, distribution, and having enough road for all that horsepower. - Tags: AI, Product Engineering, Growth - [The Agent Told Me It Was HIPAA Compliant](/blog/the-agent-told-me-it-was-hipaa-compliant/) - Published: June 15, 2026 - Description: AI can generate convincing healthcare software. It cannot declare your product safe, legal, or compliant just because the checklist looks complete. - Tags: AI, Healthcare, Cybersecurity, Compliance - [The Software Factory Works Best After You Know What You're Making](/blog/the-software-factory-works-best-after-you-know-what-youre-making/) - Published: June 12, 2026 - Description: Agent loops are powerful for mature systems with known patterns. Product discovery still needs human judgment close to the work. - Tags: AI, Product Strategy, Software Delivery - [The Rise of Mediocrity and the Death of the Real Turd](/blog/the-rise-of-mediocrity-and-the-death-of-the-real-turd/) - Published: June 10, 2026 - Description: AI did not make everything worse. It made bad harder to see. - Tags: AI, Opinion, Creative Work - [The magic in the meeting](/blog/the-magic-in-the-meeting/) - Published: June 9, 2026 - Description: AI can make execution cheap, but the real product judgment still happens when the right people stay with the problem together. - Tags: AI, Product, Leadership - [Cast the Ring Into the Fire: Why Founders Must Resist the Temptation to Add One More Feature](/blog/cast-the-ring-into-the-fire/) - Published: June 8, 2026 - Description: Early products need one powerful story. Every extra persona, workflow, and feature can weaken the focus that makes the first users care. - Tags: Product Strategy, Founders, Fractional CTO - [A Runtime for Non-Deterministic UI](/blog/json-lisp-ai-written-interfaces/) - Published: June 5, 2026 - Description: JSON Lisp started with a question: what if AI could stream the right interface for one user instead of forcing everyone through the winning side of an A/B test? - Tags: Case Study, AI, Interface Design - [Building AI-Assisted Workflows Inside a Regulated Environment](/blog/karvenience-regulated-ai-workflows/) - Published: June 5, 2026 - Description: Karvenience shows why sensitive data changes the AI conversation: credit applications, documents, integrations, and operational trust all need boundaries. - Tags: Case Study, AI, Regulated Software - [Production CTO for the AI-Prototype Era](/blog/fractional-cto-in-the-ai-era/) - Published: June 4, 2026 - Description: Founders can get farther than ever with AI tools. The hard part is crossing the final mile into software customers can trust. - Tags: Fractional CTO, AI, Product Engineering - [What to Do When Your AI Prototype Gets Stuck](/blog/what-to-do-when-your-ai-prototype-gets-stuck/) - Published: June 2, 2026 - Description: The demo proved something. Now you need to figure out whether it is a product, a workflow, a throwaway prototype, or a technical trap. - Tags: AI Prototypes, Product Rescue, Founders - [Turning a Homegrown Lead Tool Into a SaaS Opportunity](/blog/gault-family-lead-management-system/) - Published: June 1, 2026 - Description: Gault Family Companies had an aging lead system, deep home-services expertise, and a chance to modernize internal software into a product for businesses like theirs. - Tags: Case Study, Internal Tools, Product Engineering - [Rebuild or Repair Your MVP?](/blog/rebuild-or-repair-your-mvp/) - Published: May 30, 2026 - Description: A messy MVP does not automatically need a rewrite. The right call depends on what the current system is costing the business. - Tags: MVP, Technical Debt, Product Rescue - [How to Rescue a Failed Agency Build](/blog/how-to-rescue-a-failed-agency-build/) - Published: May 27, 2026 - Description: A bad agency handoff can leave founders with code, invoices, and no confidence. The rescue starts by separating blame from diagnosis. - Tags: Agency Handoff, Product Rescue, Founders - [What a Product Rescue Audit Should Tell You](/blog/what-a-product-rescue-audit-should-tell-you/) - Published: May 24, 2026 - Description: A useful audit should not just list problems. It should tell a founder what to do next, what to avoid, and what risk the business is carrying. - Tags: Product Rescue, Fractional CTO, Due Diligence - [The Worst Kind of Failure Looks Like Success](/blog/the-worst-kind-of-failure-looks-like-success/) - Published: May 22, 2026 - Description: A team can hit the deadline, ship the feature, and still avoid the thing the business needed to learn. - Tags: Delivery, Product, Leadership - [Do Hard Things Before You Automate Them](/blog/do-hard-things-before-you-automate/) - Published: May 8, 2026 - Description: AI and automation are most useful after you understand the work well enough to know what should disappear. - Tags: AI, Operations, Product Strategy - [When the Rewrite Is the Responsible Move](/blog/best-app-traumatic-brain-injury-accessibility/) - Published: May 1, 2026 - Description: BEST App Suite started as a mobile migration. Years of real user behavior taught us why a Rails PWA was the better product for people with traumatic brain injury. - Tags: Case Study, Accessibility, Healthcare - [Misunderstanding Technical Debt](/blog/misunderstanding-technical-debt/) - Published: April 18, 2026 - Description: Technical debt is not automatically bad. The real problem is when nobody remembers what the debt bought or when it has come due. - Tags: Technical Debt, Engineering Leadership, Startups - [Client Anxiety Is Product Signal](/blog/client-anxiety-is-product-signal/) - Published: March 29, 2026 - Description: An anxious customer is not always a delivery problem. Sometimes they are showing you where the product, process, or promise is unclear. - Tags: Clients, Product, Delivery - [Marketplaces Do Not Start as Marketplaces](/blog/marketplaces-do-not-start-as-marketplaces/) - Published: February 17, 2026 - Description: The cold start problem is not a technical problem first. It is the part of the business most founders have to solve by hand. - Tags: Marketplaces, Product Strategy, Startups - [When an AI Project Needs a Rules Engine](/blog/conduiit-incentiviiz-ai-tax-incentives/) - Published: December 12, 2025 - Description: Incentiviiz started with an LLM thesis. The real product needed a hands-on fractional CTO, deterministic software, and AI used in the right place. - Tags: Case Study, AI, Product Engineering - [Modernizing a Service Admin UI Without a Rewrite](/blog/service-admin-ui-modernization/) - Published: September 18, 2025 - Description: A service admin panel had become hard to change. The fix was not a full rewrite, but an AI-assisted strangler migration from strange React patterns to predictable code. - Tags: Case Study, Product Rescue, React