Posts by David Montz on leadership, AI, building, and the in-between.https://davidmontz.com/en-ushttps://davidmontz.com/posts/frontier-moved-both-ends/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.Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTaistrategyeconomicshttps://davidmontz.com/posts/affordable-ai-open-source/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.Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTaistrategyfinancehttps://davidmontz.com/posts/inventory-is-asset-velocity/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.Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTaiagentsstrategyhttps://davidmontz.com/posts/jamie-ai-staff/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.Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTaiagentsleadershiphttps://davidmontz.com/posts/tech-as-managed-investment/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.Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTleadershipstrategyfinancehttps://davidmontz.com/posts/shadow-ai-workforce/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.Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTaistrategyleadershiphttps://davidmontz.com/posts/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.Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTagentsclaudetuningaihttps://davidmontz.com/posts/autonomy-without-delivery/https://davidmontz.com/posts/autonomy-without-delivery/Autonomy without delivery is a vacation; delivery without autonomy is soul-crushing.Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTleadershipautonomydeliveryhttps://davidmontz.com/posts/tech-strategy-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.Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTstrategyleadershipaihttps://davidmontz.com/posts/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.Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTleadershipaiagentshttps://davidmontz.com/posts/managers-are-back/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.Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTleadershipmanagementaihttps://davidmontz.com/posts/claude-code-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.Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTaitoolshttps://davidmontz.com/posts/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.Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThiringleadershipaihttps://davidmontz.com/posts/unavoidable-cost/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.Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTaiagentsleadershiphttps://davidmontz.com/posts/tmux-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.Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTtoolsagentshttps://davidmontz.com/posts/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?Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTaiagentsarchitecturehttps://davidmontz.com/posts/three-types-of-companies-ai/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.Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTaistrategyleadershiphttps://davidmontz.com/posts/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.Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTaieconomicsstrategyhttps://davidmontz.com/posts/agentic-is-the-new-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."Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTaiagentsstrategyhttps://davidmontz.com/posts/everyone-is-an-ade/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.Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTaiagentsleadershiphttps://davidmontz.com/posts/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.Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTaileadershipstrategyhttps://davidmontz.com/posts/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.Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTaiagentsarchitecturehttps://davidmontz.com/posts/ai-isnt-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.Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTaisaasstrategyhttps://davidmontz.com/posts/feverishly-keeping-up-with-ai/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.Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTaileadership