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The guides, posts and answers that help a founder buy software delivery well — free, sourced, and written for people who sign the invoices rather than write the code.
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Evergreen playbooks: what engineering costs, build vs buy, hiring, contracts, security, diligence.
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Commentary on AI and engineering, written for the people paying for software.
ExploreThe Founder's Tech Brief
A monthly, numbers-first brief for non-technical founders. One email, no fluff.
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Real engagements with real numbers, anonymised where they must be.
ExploreFAQ
Straight answers on how a fractional CTO engagement actually works.
ExploreStart with these
What software engineering actually costs in 2026
UK day rates, salaries and agency bands for 2026, plus the arithmetic that turns a quote you can't judge into a quote you can negotiate.
Build vs buy: a founder's guide to the decision that compounds
Most founders build the part they could have bought and buy the part that should have been their moat. How to draw the line, price the real cost, and decide.
Five questions to ask before you sign with an agency
Under UK law, paying the invoice does not transfer ownership. Five questions that decide whether you own your product or merely rent it.
The AI coding shift: your engineers just got faster, and your codebase might be in trouble
AI writes around 40% of new code. The speed is real. So is the security and comprehension debt that arrives three months later, and what you should put around it.
AI coding tools, ranked for founders: you don't need the best one, you need the right stack
Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, Codex — the leading tools are all genuinely good now. Choose by your stage and the layer you standardise, not by the leaderboard.
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