Amazing CTO | More happiness and success
🚀 119.4

by Stephan Schmidt

Happy 🌞 Sunday,

Welcome to my opinionated newsletter. This week’s opinions & insights

• 🎯 The Intentful Company changes everything
• 🎨 Your vision is sabotaging you
• 🌉 Why engineers build 90-Degree turns
• 🤖 MCP is eating the world— don’t be left behind
• 💻 Hard learnings from building with Claude Code
• ⚡ HOLY SMOKES! 200% faster DeepSeek
• 🔧 What is this context engineering everyone talks about?
• 🍎 Killing trust the Apple way
• 📊 How (not) to P-Hack in Startups

Good reading, have a nice Sunday ❤️ and a great week,

Stephan
Startup CTO Coach

If you only read one thing

The Intentful Company - A Series (3 minute read)

A friend of mine created a new Substack series on the Intentful Company. I consider him one of the best product strategists out there - something most companies lack as a skill. Now on Intent: Too many companies (most?) are opportunity driven. They see potential money dangling and go for it, chasing it forever, running in circles. Growing slowly, but not getting anywhere. I have talked about this in the past with many clients, they need a vision to become great (can be simple!). Markus has a different take on this, with his much broader experience he boils it down to ‘intent’:

Few companies show real intent.
Most simply act or react. 
They survive - but they fail to define!
And by “define” I don’t mean “change the whole world” but 
“pick a niche and define it”. 
It can be small.
\[..\] I think intent (potentially followed by grit) is 
the number one ingredient that makes the difference.

He made it a series, highly recommended reading and subscribing, you get pure gold for free, this is a game changer. What is your intent?

https://intentfulcompany.substack.com/p/intentful-intro

Stories I’ve enjoyed this week

being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage (25 minute read)

What an impactful article. Right from the beginning:

There is a moment, just before creation begins, when the work exists in its most perfect form in your imagination. It lives in a crystalline space between intention and execution, where every word is precisely chosen, every brushstroke deliberate, every note inevitable, but only in your mind. In this prelapsarian state, the work is flawless because it is nothing: a ghost of pure potential that haunts the creator with its impossible beauty.

And this is a curse. Because when we start, the work will look very different from what we imagined. It stopped me and millions of other people from working on something to make it big and wonderful. Perhaps it hit you too. Your vision vs. reality.

Watch a child draw. They create fearlessly, unselfconsciously, because they have not yet developed the curse of sophisticated taste! They draw purple trees and flying elephants with the confidence of someone who has never been told that trees aren't purple, that elephants don't fly. 

The same happens when you want to launch a product. In your vision, it hockey sticks and goes viral, but you have the nagging feeling - experience! - it’s not. So you procrastinate the release. Don’t. Read the article to learn about “taste-skill discrepancy” and “the quitting point.” ❤️ Long read, but very much worth it. Then let your vision guide and motivate you, not despair you when you start.

https://maalvika.substack.com/p/being-too-ambitious-is-a-clever-form

7 Engineers Suspended After $2.3 Million Bridge Includes Bizarre 90-Degree Turn (3 minute read)

Everyone bashing the engineers, they built a bridge that had a 90 degree turn in it. Pressured with requirements which where impossible to square, they made the impossible possible and built a bridge. Unusable, but a bridge. I see this over and over again in product development. Engineers getting pressured to deliver the impossible, just because the CEO thinks the conceivable is the possible. And under the hood we then have many 90 degree turns. As a CTO, do you give pushback? Or push the engineers harder? Until they build 90 degree turns? Who are you?

https://www.vice.com/en/article/7-engineers-suspended-after-2-3-million-bridge-includes-bizarre-90-degree-turn/

MCP is eating the world—and it’s here to stay (7 minute read)

MCP is a game changer. An easy way to make services and data accessible to AIs. One of the first things you should do in a transition to AI is enable your services with MCP - so an AI agent can easily use your services for information gathering and taking actions. Also leads to a mindblowing demo for the CEO. Easy to do, high impact, many possibilities.

https://www.stainless.com/blog/mcp-is-eating-the-world--and-its-here-to-stay

I Shipped a macOS App Built Entirely by Claude Code (19 minute read)

Many good practical insights for using Claude Code - which partially mirror my own on working on Marvai. “If Claude doesn’t produce a well-designed UI the first time, you can just tell it to “make it more beautiful/elegant/usable” This will cost many designer jobs, not at the top tier, but everyone else. I might add from my experience, add an extensive debug.log so Claude Code can understand what is going on. Otherwise, great read.

https://www.indragie.com/blog/i-shipped-a-macos-app-built-entirely-by-claude-code

HOLY SMOKES! A new, 200% faster DeepSeek R1-0528 variant appears from German lab TNG Technology Consulting GmbH (8 minute read)

People love to discuss energy usage of AI. It might be high, it might not be. But it’s like discussing fuel efficiency in 1888 when the first car was on an overland journey and the driver, Bertha Benz (what an adventurer ❤️!), had to find pharmacies to refill the gas tank (a pharmacy near Heidelberg is the first gas station in the world because of this). And AI? Weight counts go down, AIs become more efficient and I’m not sure gaming graphics cards are the best way to execute AI models.

https://venturebeat.com/ai/holy-smokes-a-new-200-faster-deepseek-r1-0528-variant-appears-from-german-lab-tng-technology-consulting-gmbh/

Context Engineering for Agents (9 minute read)

Here it is, the next buzz word, context engineering. Of course, as all buzz words, it will go away soon - LLMs will get larger context windows, become better at saving and compacting state and engineers will understand to create the right requirement artifacts. That all said, today context engineering is a thing. And the article delivers a good overview with some practical advice. Side effect: You can sound as being on the cutting edge of AI. As a sidenote: We don’t know what we’re doing, and it’s exciting to discover new things every day. Finding out how to use AIs, how to use AIs for coding. When the internet arrived, we watched coffee machines make coffee at the other end of the world. Fabulous times. We’re there again after 30 years. Exciting!

https://rlancemartin.github.io/2025/06/23/context_engineering/

The New Skill in AI is Not Prompting, It’s Context Engineering (4 minute read)

Another shorter article on context engineering (with a picture!). Can’t have enough right now that are good.

https://www.philschmid.de/context-engineering

More on Apple’s Trust-Eroding ‘F1 The Movie’ Wallet Ad (4 minute read)

Apple put an ad in their wallet eroding trust. Isn’t it astonishing, billions spent in previous years on ads to build trust (security jada jada jada), then one opportunity to make a little money, and - because the money spent is already gone, but the revenue gained is ahead - kill the trust. I predict Apple selling data as soon as they see an opportunity to make money and revenue growth is down. They are not special. No company is. Companies have no values. They are guided by making the maximum profit on one hand, and restrained by the law on the other (sometimes not even that). There are no other guiding principles. Volkswagen takes ~$10 per month so you can check the battery of your expensive electric car. Someone C-Suite surely said, “we sell 1 million cars, $10 per month is $120 million per year.” Ka-Ching!! The money is forgotten next quarter, but the reputation loss and annoyed customers stay. Companies fall for the quick buck just like the next person. The next quarter is always more important than the next year. Don’t be that company, give pushback.

https://daringfireball.net/2025/06/more_on_apples_trust-eroding_f1_the_movie_wallet_ad

P-Hacking in Startups (8 minute read)

One of the jobs most CTOs neglect is: Make sure proper features are build, things that move the company forward. You have been entrusted with millions of dollars in salaries, you’re responsible! “Product made me do it!” is not an execuse. Many companies have no clue what they are doing, and some do experiments. Could be a great idea, if people would not be cheating. Which brings me to the article. “Reframing the metric after the results are in” and “Running experiments until we get a hit”, I have seen that all and more. The article goes into detail how to do experiments right. And as CTO you need to demand that they are done right. You’re responsible.

https://briefer.cloud/blog/posts/p-hacking/