Technical leadership without a full-time hire. Someone senior in the room for the decisions that are expensive to reverse.
This page explains what the work actually is and who it suits. It is not a pitch — engagements run through the studio.
Advisory goes wrong when it stays abstract. These are the concrete things the role covers.
Decide how the system is put together and write down why. Data model, service boundaries, what to build and what to buy. Decisions get documented so they survive a staff change.
Read the proposal, read the code, interview the team. Say what is actually being offered and where the estimate does not hold up.
Sequence work so dependencies land in the right order and the risky, uncertain parts get tested early rather than last.
Write the job description, screen the technical work, and run the parts of the interview a non-technical founder cannot assess.
What a technical choice does to headcount, hosting spend, and the operating model. This is the part most technical advice leaves out, and it is why I can say no credibly.
The most valuable item on the list. Push back on the expensive, hard-to-reverse decision while pushing back is still cheap.
Three situations account for most of the calls.
They say six months. You have no way to know whether that is true, whether the architecture is sound, or whether you are being managed. You need someone on your side of the table who can read the work.
Timelines keep moving, scope keeps changing, and nobody can say plainly what is left. Usually this is not a people problem. It is an architecture or decision-making problem nobody has named.
A platform, a vendor contract, a rewrite, an acquisition. The kind of choice that is cheap this week and very expensive in eighteen months.
Being honest about this saves everyone a call. This is a partnership, not a vendor arrangement. If what you want is someone to take a finished spec, execute it, and not ask questions, that is a real need and the studio can meet it — but it isn't this. The value here is in the questions.
It is also not a fit if you don't want strategic input. Some engagements come with the decisions already made and only need hands on a keyboard. That is fine, and it is a different arrangement.
And it isn't a fit if what you actually want is agreement. A meaningful part of the role is disagreeing with you early, in writing, while the cost of changing course is still low.
An engineer who's owned a P&L. Most people who can evaluate an architecture have never owned a budget, and most people who can read a P&L can't read the code. I spent eight years as Director of Development and Operations with profit-and-loss responsibility across three departments, after fifteen years writing the software.
That changes what the advice sounds like. A recommendation arrives with the cost attached — what it does to headcount, to hosting spend, to the next eighteen months — because I have had to live with that answer from the other side of the table.
Most expensive problems I get called into were not caused by bad engineers. They were caused by a decision nobody senior enough was in the room to question. That is the job: be in the room, understand the tradeoff, and be willing to say the unpopular thing while it is still cheap to change.
Advice is easy to give and hard to check. These are three real decisions, two of them pointing in opposite directions, and what happened after.
Ridgeline Engineering's internal tool had hit a wall: hard to extend, built for one organization, and impossible to hand to customers.
The call: Rebuild it, around the physical Site as the core record, as a multi-tenant SaaS customers run themselves.
What happened: TowerSight was live in under four months with every legacy record migrated.
TowerSight case study ↗Blazin Safety's inspection platform ran on end-of-life Laravel 6. A previous rewrite had already stalled at roughly 18%.
The call: Don't rewrite. Upgrade in place, one gated phase at a time, with the database schema treated as untouchable.
What happened: Ten of thirteen phases in: five framework versions moved, 225,000 records and the audit trail intact, 103 tests added where there were none.
Blazin Safety case study ↗A client arrived with budget approved for an iPhone and Android app.
The call: Don't build it. Ship one responsive web app with PWA features instead.
What happened: Installable on a phone, found on Google, one codebase, and fixes live the same day.
Read the reasoning →“Our old system did the job but it had hit a wall. We couldn't grow it, and we couldn't hand it to customers. Travis took the whole thing on himself, reframed it around how we actually think about our sites, and had a modern, self-service platform live in under four months with all of our data moved over. It's the difference between a tool we maintained and a product our clients can run themselves.”
“Every week I know exactly where things stand: what moved, what's blocking, and what's next. I've never once had to chase Travis for an update. Meanwhile the application my whole business runs on has been brought up to date underneath us, and my team hasn't had to change how they work or lose a single record. That's the part I didn't think was possible.”
How I make this call: Rebuild vs Refactor
Fractional arrangements come in three shapes, and which one fits depends on how often decisions arrive rather than on how much work there is.
The usual first step
A fixed-scope review of the one thing you need a straight answer on. You keep the written assessment whether or not we work together afterwards.
Requests go through AIwhirks, my software studio. I read and answer every one myself.
AIwhirks is my software studio — advisory and build both start there, and I do the work either way. Describe the decision, the build, or the team you are trying to assess, and you will get an honest read on whether I am the right person for it.
Start a conversation at AIwhirks ↗If it isn't a fit, you'll be told so and pointed somewhere better.
A senior technical leader working with you part-time instead of as a full-time hire. The work is architecture ownership, vendor and agency evaluation, roadmap sequencing, input on engineering hires, code review, and pushing back on expensive decisions. Companies use it when technical decisions have outgrown the founder but the workload doesn't yet justify a full-time CTO salary.
An agency is who you hire to build the thing. A fractional CTO is who you hire to decide whether it should be built that way, and to tell you when the agency's estimate doesn't hold up. The roles are complementary, and a fractional CTO sits on your side of the table.
The common basis across the market is 10–20% the cost of a full-time CTO, because you're buying a fraction of the time. Where a given engagement falls in that range depends on how much standing availability it needs; a one-off assessment is usually quoted as a fixed scope instead. Specific numbers get worked out in the first conversation, which happens at AIwhirks.
A written assessment of one codebase, team, vendor proposal or decision: what is actually there, the risks, what each option costs, and a clear recommendation, followed by a walkthrough call. Scope and timeline are agreed before work starts and the fee is fixed and quoted up front, with no retainer attached. How it works.
Less than people expect. The expensive decisions are usually about architecture, sequencing, and people rather than syntax. Hands-on depth here is strongest in PHP, JavaScript and TypeScript, Node, relational databases including PostgreSQL and MySQL, cloud infrastructure, and AI-augmented development workflows — worth raising on the first call if your stack sits outside that.
