About
I'm a CTO who builds. For most of my career, I hired engineers, coordinated teams, and translated business requirements into technical work. Then AI tools changed what one person can ship.
I spent years managing teams. Hiring, coordinating, translating business requirements into sprint tickets. The gap between my architectural vision and my personal output was the bottleneck I kept working around.
AI coding tools dissolved that barrier. I went hands-on again. Now I ship production mobile apps, backend systems, AI pipelines, and infrastructure. Solo or with one other engineer.
Not because I want to do everything forever. But building the whole thing yourself changes how you think about what's possible. Now I install that same capability in other teams.
Technical range
React Native + Expo, Go, TypeScript, Node.js, Firebase, GCP, Docker, Terraform, Cloudflare, LLM pipelines, voice. And the layer that decides shipping speed now: Claude Code, agentic harnesses, Playwright-driven self-verification. I don't chase shiny tools. I pick boring tech that ships.
How I think
On engineering and business
I step into product roles naturally. Users, pricing, retention. Not just code. Technology decisions are business decisions.
On teams and AI
I've led teams, and I've shipped solo. The CTO role is changing. The best technical leaders in 2026 need to do both.
On shipping
I optimize for velocity over elegance. Ship, learn, iterate. Elegant architecture comes after product-market fit.
Writing
I wrote a newsletter for 2 years. 236 posts on engineering leadership, shipping velocity, team architecture, AI tooling, and business-tech alignment. Zero gaps longer than a week. Then I stopped for a year and a half. I'm writing again. The archive is here.
When I'm not building software, I'm running a homelab across three countries, tinkering with vintage computers, or drilling holes in pegboards.
Background
15+ years across startups, agencies, and scale-ups. Engineering leadership since 2016. Based in Brno, Czech Republic.
Contact
If your team has a real codebase and AI hasn't made it faster yet, that's the conversation I want. I take a small number of AI-enablement engagements. Currently open.
taj@pelc.cc