# David Montz > Technology executive. CIO / CTO / CAIO for mid-size and growing companies. Writing on leadership, AI, building, and the in-between. This file is a structured index for AI agents and crawlers. The site is published at https://davidmontz.com. ## Pages - [About](https://davidmontz.com/about/): David's background, highlights, strategic-direction work, team-building approach, and P&L discipline. - [Projects](https://davidmontz.com/projects/): The things David builds and helps run. - [Work with me](https://davidmontz.com/work-with-me/): Current availability and engagement types (full-time, fractional, advisor, board seat). - [Posts](https://davidmontz.com/posts/): Long-form and short-form writing, mirrored from LinkedIn and X. ## Projects - [Agentic Enterprise Platform](https://davidmontz.com/projects/agentic-enterprise-platform/): A vendor-agnostic platform bringing agentic capabilities to mid-market enterprises. Co-founded at Able Software. - [Home Automation](https://davidmontz.com/projects/homeassistant/): Custom Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi, one of David's agents in its scope. - [Kid Ledger 5000](https://davidmontz.com/projects/kl5k/): A book on a ledger-based allowance system for kids. Available at https://kl5k.com. - [PlanShopChop](https://davidmontz.com/projects/psc/): An AI sous chef. Hobby project that turned into a real product. Live at https://planshopchop.com. - [The Original Stretchlace](https://davidmontz.com/projects/stretchlace/): David's wife Jamie's elastic shoelace company, Shark Tank Season 12 Episode 24. Live at https://theoriginalstretchlace.com. ## Posts - [Both Ends of the AI Frontier Moved in One Week](https://davidmontz.com/posts/frontier-moved-both-ends/): A week after writing about open source as the more affordable path, the commercial frontier gave fresh evidence of how fast it moves. Sonnet 5 matched Opus 4.8 on many tasks at much lower cost, while Fable 5 took the top of the leaderboard at a premium. New capability gets unlocked at the top, then the economics catch up. - [AI Might Be More Affordable Than You Think](https://davidmontz.com/posts/affordable-ai-open-source/): Almost every company using AI today rents access and pays per use. Open source models you run behind your own walls, for a cost you control, are now good enough for most day-to-day work. The question is no longer whether you can afford the best AI, but whether your work actually demands it. - [A Shoelace and a Dewatering Pump Have the Same Problem](https://davidmontz.com/posts/inventory-is-asset-velocity/): A rental fleet and an online catalog run on the same physics. Every asset is either earning or waiting, and the whole job is to shrink the waiting and put a number on what it costs. - [Jamie Staffed Her Business with a Team of AI Agents](https://davidmontz.com/posts/jamie-ai-staff/): My wife Jamie staffed her small business with a team of AI agents. She still makes every call. She just stopped being the bottleneck for all of them. - [Treat Technology as an Investment, Not an Expense](https://davidmontz.com/posts/tech-as-managed-investment/): Capitalizing the right technology work aligns its cost with the value it produces. Here is what that changes about how you fund technology and how you judge whether it is working. - [AI Is Already Working in Your Company: A Practical Overview for Busy Executives](https://davidmontz.com/posts/shadow-ai-workforce/): A practical overview of where AI is already operating inside your company today, written for non-technical executives. - [What the model actually sees](https://davidmontz.com/posts/what-the-model-actually-sees/): Tuning your agents is very important. Understanding what the model actually sees on each turn is the difference between tuning with a sledgehammer vs a scalpel. - [Autonomy without delivery is a vacation](https://davidmontz.com/posts/autonomy-without-delivery/): Autonomy without delivery is a vacation; delivery without autonomy is soul-crushing. - [Tech strategy serves business strategy](https://davidmontz.com/posts/tech-strategy-business-strategy/): A company whose product IS technology needs to optimize for speed of learning cycles. A company whose operations RUN ON technology needs to optimize for speed of adaption. - [The most fulfilling thing](https://davidmontz.com/posts/most-fulfilling-thing/): I recently spent a few hours with a close friend helping him set up his first agentic team. He went from zero agents to three in a few hours. - [Managers are back in the game](https://davidmontz.com/posts/managers-are-back/): I have always leaned toward less layers of management. AI has caused the lines to blur between managers and individual contributors, and the best ones are stronger than ever. - [Claude Code added Jeopardy mode](https://davidmontz.com/posts/claude-code-jeopardy-mode/): While I am still a fan of Claude Code and Opus it has been feeling a little off lately. This morning I finally figured it out. - [The experience gate has evolved](https://davidmontz.com/posts/experience-gate-has-evolved/): I have always used passion, aptitude, and experience to guide my hiring decisions. AI has made me look at experience through a different lens. - [The unavoidable cost every AI agent fleet eventually pays](https://davidmontz.com/posts/unavoidable-cost/): "Pay now or pay later" is a timeless phrase. The unavoidable hard thing is that your fleet's usefulness will degrade over time if you don't proactively maintain it. - [tmux might be my new favorite utility](https://davidmontz.com/posts/tmux-favorite-utility/): Wow — I think tmux might be my new favorite utility. There is so much you can do with this around agent orchestration. - [Models, Harnesses, Agents and Orchestrators: The Composable Agentic Stack](https://davidmontz.com/posts/composable-agentic-stack/): I hear a lot about agents these days. Less about harnesses. They're different things. Or are they? - [Three types of companies through the AI lens](https://davidmontz.com/posts/three-types-of-companies-ai/): I suspect there are 3 types of companies through the lens of AI adoption. The trailblazers, the aspiring trailblazers, and the hyper-focused specialists. - [Token burn: good or bad?](https://davidmontz.com/posts/token-burn-good-or-bad/): Unless you are financially incentivized to burn hot, it seems silly to say token burn rate is a useful signal in isolation. What matters is burn relative to value creation. - [Agentic is the new "we need a website"](https://davidmontz.com/posts/agentic-is-the-new-website/): The need for companies to rapidly adopt enterprise agentic solutions feels a lot like what happened in the late '90s: "we need a website." - [Your job today is to be an Agentic Deployment Engineer](https://davidmontz.com/posts/everyone-is-an-ade/): From C-Level to Junior, your job today is to be an Agentic Deployment Engineer (ADE). Stop brute forcing your business operations with humans. - [Start smaller, move faster](https://davidmontz.com/posts/start-smaller-move-faster/): Pick one process that's manual, repetitive, and expensive. Let AI take a first pass at it. The leaders getting ahead right now aren't smarter, they're just starting smaller. - [AI as organizational infrastructure](https://davidmontz.com/posts/ai-as-organizational-infrastructure/): Most AI today assumes the actor is you — a person plus a chat window plus an LLM. That works for individuals. It doesn't work for companies. - [The real AI opportunity isn't replacing SaaS](https://davidmontz.com/posts/ai-isnt-replacing-saas/): SaaS isn't dying. It's evolving into something more powerful. We're moving from systems of record to systems of agency. - [If you're feverishly keeping up with AI, good](https://davidmontz.com/posts/feverishly-keeping-up-with-ai/): I'm not talking about asking ChatGPT to analyze some files. This goes way beyond that. ## Feeds - [RSS](https://davidmontz.com/rss.xml): full-text feed of posts. - [Sitemap](https://davidmontz.com/sitemap.xml): full URL set.