Zalt Blog

What does a fractional CTO actually do day to day? They own the senior technical decisions, roadmap, architecture, hiring, reviews, and investor confidence, a few days a month. The job is leverage, not writing every line of code. Here is the full breakdown.

How do you choose the right AI consultant when everyone sounds impressive? Weight production experience above the pitch, ask what broke in production, and watch for anyone who cannot say no. Here is the checklist, including the red flags.

What is the best AI training for an engineering team? Not the biggest course brand. The best kind is hands-on, built around your own stack, led by a senior facilitator, and it leaves the team with a reference repo they keep. Here is the full checklist.

Think a cache hit means the work is done? “A Cache Hit Is Not Free” offers a useful reminder: look past the hit and ask what it still costs before calling it a win.

A podcast or fireside chat exposes shallow AI knowledge in about three questions, because there is no slide deck to hide behind. Here is how to brief a guest so the episode runs itself, and why remote is the easiest format to book.

A model is stateless between calls. Agent memory and retrieval are the engineering that fakes continuity: the context window for short-term, a vector store for long-term, and retrieval that injects only what each step needs.

You can automate your own work with AI agents without writing code. Find the repetitive, low-judgment tasks, hand each to an agent, and keep yourself in the loop for the decisions that matter. Here is the full playbook.

When should a startup hire a fractional CTO? When hard, hard-to-reverse technology decisions start shaping the company but a full-time CTO is still premature. If two or more of the classic signals are true right now, you are already a little late.

Where should the boundaries be when working with llama.cpp? “How llama.cpp Finds Safe Seams” offers a useful lens for engineers who want to think more carefully about safe divisions.

A good technical keynote speaker is not the most polished one. It is the one who has shipped the work, tells the truth about tradeoffs, and can answer your engineers' hardest question live. Here is how to spot one before you book.