Practical essays on product engineering, technical leadership, and the tradeoffs behind maintainable systems for focused teams.
Format
Engineering dispatches
Topics
Product / Systems / Teams
Archive
Latest first
Dispatch archive
Practical notes / Current index
01.
July 16, 2026
A fractional tech lead helps founders turn an ambiguous product or engineering goal into a practical build path, then stays close enough to the code to help ship it. This guide compares the role with a fractional CTO, agency, senior freelancer, and full-time hire.
02.
July 15, 2026
AI coding agents are most useful when they absorb predictable implementation work. Visual HTML artifacts keep the work verifiable while engineers spend more time on product ambiguity, architecture, and decisions that are expensive to reverse.
03.
July 14, 2026
AI can make an internal tool quick to build, but the subscription comparison changes once colleagues depend on it. A useful build-versus-buy calculation includes expansion, maintenance, support, and the value of the work those hours replace.
04.
July 13, 2026
Coding agents make technical exploration and repeatable implementation cheaper. This practical agentic engineering workflow shows how to use that leverage while keeping architecture, domain understanding, and production responsibility inside the team.
Working principle / 01
Engineering decisions are product decisions when the team is small.
MBV Labs
Decide / Build / Learn
Editorial scope / Three fields
01.
Turning ambiguous goals into shipped systems.
02.
Clear choices for founders and lean teams.
03.
Architecture, operations, and code that can change.