We audited a company where developers had to physically drive to the office to restart production servers.
52% of SaaS companies we audit still deploy manually. Quarterly releases. FTP uploads. Builds uploaded by hand.
The year is 2026. The deployment process is 2009.
Read the full article: madewithlove.com/blog/a-found...
Founders can't outsource the decision about what engineering culture they want.
They can outsource implementation. The commitment stays with the founder. The ones who defer it to 'whoever we hire next' end up with an engineering culture designed by accident.
Read the full article: madewithlove.com/blog/the-ai-...
What an AI agile manifesto might look like:
Individuals and interactions over agents and workflows. Working software over token counts. Customer collaboration over prompt tuning.
The values are the same, but the tools drastically change.
The fastest teams we audit are the ones that change their minds the fastest when the data says something different.
Engineering says 'six months to refactor.' Management hears 'delay.'
Management says 'ship by Q3.' Engineering hears 'we don't care about stability.'
Both sides are right about what they need. Wrong about what the other is saying.
The gap isn't skill, but shared language.
Read the full article: madewithlove.com/blog/onboard...
Onboarding AI agents needs the same thing as onboarding developers.
Codebase tour. Style guide. Architecture doc. The reasons a pattern exists, not just the pattern.
The onboarding document sitting unfinished in your Notion for six months is the one that would make your AI agent useful next week.
A founder told me the rewrite would cost 200,000 euros.
I asked what that didn't include.
Frozen roadmap. Two senior engineers leaving. Customers churning. Delayed Series B.
Real cost: 6.73 million.
A rewrite isn't a line item, but a strategic decision with a seven-figure shadow.
PMF without measurement isn't PMF, but a pattern someone noticed.
The CTO who never takes a holiday isn't dedicated, but the bottleneck.
Seniority is a structure problem, not a salary problem.
The cost of a bad senior engineering hire, properly accounted for, is 968,000 euros.
Nine months of salary. Six months of frozen roadmap. Two senior engineers who quit mid-tenure. Technical debt to rewrite.
A bad senior hire isn't a salary mistake, but a company mistake.
The strongest company in 150+ audits wasn't the one with the best developers, but the one where every team had a PM, a QA engineer, and a designer alongside the devs.
You cannot hire your way out of a structural problem.
The best test of an audit is whether the CTO already knew it.
Process is what you write down. Culture is what people do when nobody's looking at the process.
Read the full article: madewithlove.com/blog/three-c...
6% of SaaS companies we audit have a CTO who routinely bypasses their own engineering processes.
Self-approved PRs. Direct commits to production.
We flag it every time. Not because it breaks the build. Because it breaks the culture.
We ran three Claude agents in parallel on the same codebase.
One wrote the feature. One reviewed the PR. One wrote the tests.
The job didn't disappear. It changed. You're no longer just writing code. You're managing agents, reviewing output, setting standards.
We wrote down every finding from 150+ SaaS audits.
90% documentation debt. 79% key-person dependency. 69% no product management. 52% no feature metrics. 40% secrets in code.
This is the industry median, not the bad half.
madewithlove.com/blog/saas-audit-benchmarks-150-companies
The easier it gets to build something, the harder it gets to build something that works.
60% of SaaS companies we audit have no incident response process. When production breaks, someone improvises. Usually the founder.
We once read an audit where the disaster recovery plan was: 'restarting the application solves most issues.'
Credit for honesty.
Our colleague Geoffrey wrote a three-part series on our blog about AI agents acting on your company's behalf.
The key question: if this agent says something stupid at 3am to a regulated customer, whose statement was that?
Always the company's. Build the boundary before the agent.
“Prompt engineering” is trending.
But the real skill is still problem solving.
AI just amplifies whatever thinking you bring to the table.
