How AI Supercharges a Fractional CTO to deliver like a Full Dev Team
AI augments your superpower - here’s how its making me a strong fractional CTO
May 29, 2025
What if you could hire a dev team along with the strategic experience to guide them? With AI, that’s exactly what I do. AI coding tools have been making remarkable improvements this year. In the past month, I’ve seen a noticeable improvement across different AI tools. By the time you’re reading this article they will be at yet another level. Many articles address the impact code generation is having on entry-level positions. But they also provide a profound shift for those who know how to work with them. As a fractional CTO, I apply these tools in my engagements and have effectively delivered what a small development team might.
AI is at its best when it helps people focus on what they do best. An entrepreneur can use AI to streamline operations or a designer can use it to accelerate creative work. Similarly I use AI to enhance my superpower: combining technical leadership with business acumen to drive results. AI lets me focus on high-impact decisions like architecting solutions, solving complex technical challenges, and ensuring development aligns with real business goals. Meanwhile I let AI agents focus on boilerplate code or repetitive tasks. This lets me function like a small, well-coordinated development team while keeping my focus where it matters most.
I use AI to enhance my superpower: combining technical leadership with business acumen to drive results
I recently used a combination of AI tools (Lovable, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot) to build a blackjack web application. I had specific goals in mind – an application to allow for crowdsourced sets of rules in play at popular casinos. The intent was to allow players to know what rules to expect and to practice them before sitting down at a table. I built a good solution by breaking down the high-level architecture and adding a set of user stories for how they should behave in isolation and as a complete system.
AI’s ability to execute on the application and API set from scratch impressed me. Each tool had different strengths and weaknesses such creating attractive user experiences, adding incremental features, and debugging issues in the code. I didn’t let these tools run unassisted, but reviewed their output along the way. I applied my experience and code-reviewing skills to iterate and get the application to work the way I wanted. It felt like dealing with a team of three developers. I even found myself coaching one of the tools when it solved a race condition via a timer rather than using an event-driven approach! The experience underscored my strength in guiding a team. I could lean on AI for rapid iteration and use my wisdom of experience for structured, human-driven decision-making.
If AI can run like a dev team, why do teams need an experienced fractional CTO? Because AI is only as effective as the person guiding it. I have the experience and strategic thinking that can make AI-driven development successful. This technical expertise combined with AI assistance is not like hiring one person, it’s hiring a small development team. These new tools allow me to focus on what startups want - to move faster, optimize workflows, and build scalable solutions with fewer resources. AI isn’t about replacing developers. It’s about making them smarter, faster, and more impactful than ever before.
AI is only as effective as the person guiding it
AI-powered development is transforming the way companies build and scale. If you’re ready to harness its power with strategic leadership, let’s talk!