Field notes from the tech tiller.
Short, practical pieces on technology leadership for growing businesses — written from inside actual engagements, not from a podium.
AI
June 11, 2026
6 min read
Five questions to ask before you sign an AI vendor contract
You're evaluating AI vendors the way you evaluate SaaS: price per seat, API response time, feature roadmap. What you're not evaluating is the cost of leaving. Most DFW SMBs don't discover switching costs until month seven, when you've retrained your team on one platform's prompt syntax and realize the data export format is proprietary. By then, you're locked in—not by contract terms, but by the operational reality of migration.
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Fractional CTO
June 10, 2026
6 min read
Your fractional CTO is solving San Francisco's problems, not Dallas's
You hired a fractional CTO last year. Competent person. Responsive. Then you needed to negotiate with a local AWS partner, move fast on a key hire, or sit down with your lawyer to structure equity incentives. That's when you realized: your CTO doesn't know DFW. Doesn't know who to call. Doesn't know how Texas incentive structures actually work. And can't show up when you need someone in the room.
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Architecture
June 1, 2026
7 min read
Your npm dependencies are someone else's security problem
Last week, malicious packages made it into Red Hat's official JavaScript client libraries. Not a typosquatting attack. Not obscure transitive dependencies. Packages with legitimate names, published to a legitimate registry, pulled into production by teams who trusted the source. For DFW SMBs running Node applications, the question isn't whether your dependencies are compromised — it's whether you have any visibility into what you're actually pulling in.
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AI
June 1, 2026
6 min read
Your AI subscription is a productivity tax — here's how to audit it
You've got a Claude subscription. A ChatGPT Pro account. Maybe a specialized legal AI platform. They renew quietly, month after month, while you tell yourself they're strategic. The truth is simpler: most DFW SMBs can't name a single repeatable process those tools actually improved. We're watching teams adopt AI reflexively, then discover months later that the subscriptions are covering aspirational workflows, not actual ones.
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AI
May 31, 2026
6 min read
ChatGPT adoption data just made your governance gap visible
OpenAI released a report on ChatGPT adoption across industries. The engineering press covered the workflow data. We're reading it as a governance warning. Because the adoption patterns they documented — faster in administrative roles, slower in legal and compliance, uneven across departments — map directly to where DFW SMBs and law firms have zero oversight right now.
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AI
May 30, 2026
6 min read
GPT-5.3-Codex just made your technical debt decision urgent
OpenAI released GPT-5.3-Codex last week — a coding agent built for multi-step technical projects without sustained human developer involvement. The press is treating it as an engineering milestone. We're treating it as a forcing function. Because before you point an autonomous agent at your codebase, you have to answer a question most DFW SMBs have been avoiding: is your technical foundation actually ready for this?
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AI
May 26, 2026
6 min read
Workspace agents are real. The vendor lock-in risk is realer.
OpenAI released workspace agents in ChatGPT last week. The pitch is a scaling story — automate complex workflows, reduce hiring pressure, run multi-step operations without manual intervention. For DFW SMBs and law firms, that's the seductive part. The less-discussed part is what happens when your business logic, your client data, and your workflows live inside OpenAI's infrastructure and nowhere else.
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AI
May 18, 2026
6 min read
Agent code search and the token-efficiency trap: what SMBs actually need
Semble just showed up on Hacker News claiming 98% fewer tokens for code search than grep. The engineering conversation is real. The business conversation most SMBs are having is different — and more important.
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AI
May 14, 2026
6 min read
Claude for small business sounds good until you realize what problem you're actually solving
Anthropic's pitch is compelling: better AI, lower costs, better for SMBs. But we've watched a dozen companies adopt Claude without first asking whether AI is the bottleneck in their business. It usually isn't.
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Architecture
May 13, 2026
7 min read
Open source licensing is a hidden cost line item for SMB tech
The Bambu Lab controversy isn't about 3D printers. It's about what happens when a company extracts value from open source without returning it. Most SMBs we work with are doing the same thing, just quietly.
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Fractional CTO
May 3, 2026
6 min read
When to hire a fractional CTO — and when you don't need one yet
Most Dallas SMBs we talk to have wrestled with this question for six months by the time they reach out. Here's the framework we use to give them a straight answer in twenty minutes.
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