Fractional CTO in Austin — 15 years, 50+ products shipped. Every Tuesday, The AI Leader's Weekly Playbook sends one practical AI play for your business: real builds, real numbers, what actually worked. No hype, no "10 ChatGPT prompts" filler. If you want AI doing real work in your company, this is your Tuesday edge.
5-step triage for the codebase you can't ship from
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Justin McKelvey | Fractional CTO & AI Consultant
Fractional CTO in Austin — 15 years, 50+ products shipped. Every Tuesday, The AI Leader's Weekly Playbook sends one practical AI play for your business: real builds, real numbers, what actually worked. No hype, no "10 ChatGPT prompts" filler. If you want AI doing real work in your company, this is your Tuesday edge.
Three flavors of debt nobody warned you about. Hi there, A team I worked with shipped 6 months of features in 8 weeks using Cursor and Claude Code. Founder loved it. Velocity tripled. Then their senior dev quit. The new hire couldn't get the app running locally for 3 weeks. The senior dev — the only human who knew which parts of the codebase were load-bearing — was gone. The new hire kept asking "wait, why does it do this?" The answer was always "because Claude wrote it that way." That's Vibe...
The 3-stage decision matrix non-technical founders need. Hi there, You're a non-technical founder with an idea. You need to ship something. The order matters. If you skip a stage, the next one breaks. 1. Vibe-code the prototype. Use Lovable, Bolt, Replit — whatever's fastest. Don't hire a developer yet. The point is to learn whether the idea has legs, not whether the code is good. Spend $20–200 here, not $20,000. 2. Hire a developer to ship v1. Once the prototype proves people want this...
10 AI tools I actually keep open. Most aren't ChatGPT. Hi there, ChatGPT is the default. It's not the answer to every question. On a normal workday I have at least 4 AI tools open. None of them is just ChatGPT. Here's where each wins: Claude — writing, analysis, anything where I need a clean first draft. Better prose than ChatGPT. Stays in voice. Cursor or Claude Code — coding. ChatGPT is fine for one-off scripts. For actual codebases, you want a tool that has the whole repo in context....