What I believe

In small SaaS teams, there's a layer of decisions that aren't code but need technical context. Third-party trade-offs. Scope calls. Tooling choices.

These don't belong to the founder alone. The technical depth required to evaluate them pulls you away from what you do best. And they don't belong to your lead dev, who needs focus time to ship.

Someone has to own that gap. Close enough to the code to understand constraints. Far enough from it to protect the team's time. That's what a fractional CTO does. Not architecture diagrams and org charts. Decisions that would otherwise pile up until something breaks.

AI has made it easier than ever to write code. A motivated founder can ship an MVP without a developer. But more code doesn't mean better products.

The bottleneck was never typing speed. It was knowing what to build, in what order, and when to stop. As the cost of building drops, the cost of building the wrong thing stays the same.

Teams that use AI to generate code without slowing down to think will build the wrong thing faster. Non-technical founders using AI tools will create more technical debt, architectural messes, and security holes faster than ever before. Speed of building increases speed of making costly mistakes.

The judgment layer gets more valuable, not less. Part of what I do is help teams build processes to use AI well: as a tool for speed and exploration, not a shortcut around the hard parts.