Thoughts, Tips & Insights
Expert guides on MVP development, AI integration, tech stacks, and scaling startups from idea to launch.
A company gave every engineer unlimited Claude Code and put up a leaderboard for who burned the most tokens. The post is at 1,000 upvotes. The top comments are about gaming the leaderboard. The leaderboard is the product. Read more
Most agency quotes are still pretending it's 2023. Here's what an MVP actually costs in 2026 — five tiers, what each one ships, where the price comes from, and the work we won't take at the bottom of the range. Read more
Three weeks, one engineer, both stores. The exact day-by-day timeline of a mobile MVP we shipped this spring, what we cut to make the window, and what we'd do differently next time. Read more
The cheapest tier in our quote sheet. What ships, what doesn't, the stack we don't negotiate on at this price, and the kind of founder this is wrong for. Read more
We've shipped 30+ production builds with Claude Code as a primary tool in the last six months. Here's what works, what gets people in trouble, the exact prompt patterns we use, and what the monthly bill looks like. Read more
A senior engineer in 2026 is more expensive (year-one outlay) and harder to find (60–90 day pipelines). A senior engagement is cheaper and starts in a week. The math everyone uses for this decision is out of date. Here's the current version. Read more
About one in five founders ask. We always say no. The reasoning isn't about loving the cap table — it's about what equity does to incentives on a 2–8 week engagement, and what we ask for instead. Read more
Most RAG implementations we audit in 2026 still ship naive embedding-cosine retrieval. They work for the demo and break for users. Here's the current bar for production RAG — hybrid search, reranking, citation-required prompts, evals that catch regressions. Read more
He didn't tell us right away. He kept sending short replies. Apologizing for the delay. Saying things would clear up soon. For weeks, we assumed it was a cash flow problem -- the kind every early-stage founder runs into at some point. Read more
Every startup founder eventually faces a production outage, a security breach, or a server bill that makes no sense. Here's why a monthly website support plan is the one investment most skip -- and the one they regret skipping most. Read more
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