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You raised, or self-funded, to build a B2B platform. Your MVP shipped in six weeks. The trouble usually shows up around month four. That gap has a name. AI-assisted coding makes it easy to produce a lot of software, fast. But that speed tends to come with a painful hangover. Research from Google and Faros shows: +861% code churn. Roughly 10x more code deleted than added. +243% production incidents per PR. The odds of a user-facing incident more than tripled. +54% bugs per developer. That rate was 9% a year ago. Steepening, not stabilizing. +31% of PRs now merged with no review at all. More velocity up front. Far more pain downstream. It's come to be known as the Acceleration Whiplash, and it usually arrives as one of three surprises: 1. A broken product in front of customers you worked hard to win. 2. An insecure system quietly exposing your users' data. 3. Strategic decisions made on analysis that turned out to be a hallucination. None of this means the tools are bad. It means software, data, and UX are still genuinely hard, and the tools have made it easy to forget that. Getting real value out of them takes first principles, a little discipline, and someone who has already made the expensive mistakes. That's what these sessions are for. Once a month I sit down with a small group of operators, founders self-funding or raising to build B2B platforms, for a working roundtable on de-risking a software build. We cover scope discipline, managing contract teams without getting burned, and where AI coding actually helps versus where it quietly hurts. We also live audit a roadmap or two from the room. No shame, no judgment, capped at 10 so the conversation stays real. If you're about to make serious bets on agentic engineering, or the people using those tools, this is the room. "His insight and perspective saved us tens of thousands of dollars early in, and probably months of heartache." Cliff Franco, 3x Founder & CEO Monthly RoundTables Next Session: Sep 15 https://lnkd.in/gh_njMdc

Your MVP shipped in 6 weeks. The Acceleration Whiplash arrives in month 4. Here's the data most founders never see coming. I'm talking about LLM-assisted software engineering — aka Agentic Engineering, aka Vibe Coding, aka picking up Claude Code and setting off into the wilderness of entrepreneurship. We've all read the headline: someone picks up Claude Code over a weekend, ships an incredible platform, and now runs a $1-10M ARR business. So you set out to emulate it. You read a few posts, talk to an LLM, and you kind of get the tools working. In 2-6 weeks the idea that's been burning in the back of your mind comes to life. Voila — problem solved. Call the bank and tell them to break out the wheelbarrows. Let's get serious for a moment. Based on my own experience as a fractional CTO and on serious research from places like Google and Faros, we know a few things. In the last two years: - Developer productivity, measured by pull requests merged, is up 1.3x (130%) - Bugs per developer are up 68% - Production incidents per pull request are up 242% This is the "Acceleration Whiplash" — more velocity up front, far more downstream pain. Code volume goes up while quality goes down, and you're left with measurably less stable systems. As a founder setting off into the wilderness, I can't stress enough how seriously you need to take this data. You have one single job: find customers with burning problems and orchestrate solutions. If seasoned engineers with 10+ years of experience struggle to control the quality of LLM-assisted code, where does that leave you? From my direct experience over the last 2 years — across 3 founder-built stacks and roughly 8,000 managed developer hours — it leaves you, the founder, burning out. Up at night building things you don't understand, that break in front of your customers, wasting 2-18 months of your seed-stage energy on a house of cards. The good news: this is a solved problem — and the fix is the evil you already know. Accountable senior developers on my team — AI-enabled, not AI-replaced — a disciplined scoping process, and a sustained low monthly burn that respects input/output constraints will build everything your early adopters can actually use. As you move from idea to product-market fit to scaling growth, you add more controllable, accountable resources — and if you have the right mindset, you skip the Acceleration Whiplash entirely. You win by doing significantly less work, significantly better, and far more efficiently. You have one job: find customers with burning problems. Let me handle the part that's keeping you up at night. 30 minutes, on my calendar, no pitch deck: https://lnkd.in/gsAwUQGm

I help experienced operators extend early-stage runways by tens of thousands of dollars. Sometimes hundreds. The levers: ridiculously well-made teams, scope discipline, and a pragmatic take on agentic engineering. If you're an industry veteran gearing up to build a new product for your current business, or starting a greenfield venture in an adjacent space, I have the knowledge and experience to create indefinite extensions to your financial runway. Fifteen years in: An MBA into the 2009 collapse. Then San Francisco. Then one of the first successful coding bootcamps. What I learned I'm best at: → hiring high-output, high-honesty contract teams → helping founders decide which scope NOT to build Combined, that's quality on tiny recurring budgets. Founders who work with me have saved tens of thousands on the low side, hundreds of thousands over time. Budget and time both. You know you're in the right place when engineering standups happen once a week, with no surprises. Now, the elephant in the room. Agentic engineering, vibe coding. "Can't I just build this on my own?" If entrepreneurship is learning to safely eat land mines, non-technical stack ownership is the biggest one you'll never learn to digest. Agentic engineering offers the allure of progress. In experienced hands with proper guardrails, it's a 2-5x pace increase. Without them, it's a hydra waiting to churn your customers. I currently manage three founder vibe-coded stacks. The Google Cloud/DORA research agrees: agentic engineering increases pace and causes massive downstream quality problems if left unchecked. Want to get your hands dirty? We like dirty hands. Let us build your agentic engineering workflow with the right architectural choices, guardrails, and a professional developer in the loop. Invest your career-defining insights into a stack that survives contact with reality. How? Over 15 years I've seen what kills early-stage ventures, and back-solved into process: → how I recruit (instinct, technical fit, DNA) → how I contract (Uber meets Hollywood) → how I constrain (find the work not to do) Book your first CTO working session with me. -> https://lnkd.in/gsAwUQGm We'll cover your product roadmap, resource management, and sales strategy. I'll walk you through my stack of CEO/Founder references. And you'll leave with the mental models that have carried other founders from inspiration to profitable operations and acquisitions. https://lnkd.in/gsAwUQGm

Vibe Coding is the way to avoid a 6-month, $500k investment to produce one brittle, barely-validated product. Vibe Coding is also a double-edged sword that cuts deeply both ways. Vibe Coding can easily lead well-intentioned, well-resourced organizations down three very bad roads: 1. Putting broken products in front of active customers -> massive reputation risk 2. Deploying insecure systems to the internet, immediate data breach -> massive legal and reputation risk 3. Making company-level strategic decisions based on flawed or hallucinatory analysis -> you go quietly into the night Software, data, UX — all still complex. Getting sustainable, valuable outcomes from Vibe Coding requires first principles, knowledge, and process. Having transitioned multiple non-technical founder/CEOs into builders, and having written agentic systems in the trenches, I've learned lessons that will keep you safe. About to make serious investments or bets on agentic engineering, Vibe Coding or people using those tools? I can help: https://lnkd.in/djdPeWbr I'll tell you exactly what needs to be considered or fixed before this becomes a $500k lesson.

I sort builders into three "vibe-coding bears": too hot (fast, gets burned), too cold (shipped it alone, now terrified of it), and just right (guardrails + a pro in the loop). GSD Camp is how you become the third one. It's a free, 6-week, 6-module deep dive into the mental models of how web software actually works — the 80/20 of elite engineering, with AI as your partner. You learn to let the machines handle the details while you own the system: chart your own course, and stay safe flying it. You also join a community of AI-enabled builders — happy hours, lightning talks, sponsored events. Founders who've done this have built their way to product-market fit and growing six-figure revenue — and can walk into an investor meeting as their own technical cofounder. It's free. Every Monday, 3:30–5pm Central, starting July 20. Remote. Come to one session or all six. Full schedule + RSVP → https://lnkd.in/eCnjyvG2 please repost for distribution :) Jim Curry Jeremy Antoniuk Bryon Jacob Austin AI Alliance Edward Kilgore Milissa Day, MBA, CCMP™, PMP®, Prosci® Whitney Woodcock John Vishnesky Lexie Murray Alex Gold Kyle Ledbetter Jesse Farmer David Boskovic Joanna Hackney Damien Aldridge Johanna Wynne Linhda Nguyen, J.D. Adam Dahlgren Bhavim Desai, MD Ken Jee Jose Bernal p.s. - if you are curious why I did all this, below is a short summary AI didn't kill the value of understanding how software works. It multiplied it. Learn a little about how the internet actually runs — HTTP, Unix, the request/response loop — and you hand yourself a 10-billion-to-1 lever: a controlling seat over the machines instead of a passenger's seat. Talking to machines is the new literacy, and the manual is already free and infinite. But there's a catch... AI makes it trivial to ship something that *seems* to work… then breaks at 2am. Fresh research 22,000 developers shows: throughput per dev up 34% — while production incidents per pull request are up 243% and code churn is up 861%. Speed without guardrails isn't speed. It's debt with a delay timer. The antidote in all spectra is education.

Having transitioned multiple non-technical founder/CEOs into builders, and having written agentic systems in the trenches, I've learned lessons that will keep you safe. About to make serious investments or bets on agentic engineering, Vibe Coding or people using those tools? I can help. I'll tell you exactly what needs to be considered or fixed before this becomes a $500k lesson.