ADVISORY
£4,500 /mo
Your senior technical voice, week in, week out.
- A weekly working session with your team
- Architecture and code review
- Vendor and build-vs-buy judgement
- Direct line to Steve
- Always month-to-month
Review, plan, build, ship. Embedded in your team's week, month-to-month. Across your codebase, your processes, and your product.
Fractional means inside your org: with leadership on direction, with your team on delivery, and hands-on across the tools, vendors, and models on your behalf.
Map where AI helps, where it's blocked, and where it's not worth it.
Pick what your team builds with me in weeks 3 and 4. Set up what's missing: tooling, agents, and ways to measure quality.
Pair on implementation with your engineers. Reviews, unblockers, decisions in flight. Agents, workflows, dev practices.
Push to production. Tighten what's working. Line up what comes after the month.
I've been shipping software for over twenty years, the last ten leading engineering, product and design.
For the last two, I've been heads-down with AI. Claude in my editor, Claude Code in the terminal, agents stitched into my day-to-day.
Shipsmith is how I do that now: embedded with one or two teams at a time.
More about me at south.dev.
That's most engagements. Week 1 is mapping where AI has actual leverage for you.
Yes. Month-to-month, embedded in your week, and I build alongside your team as well as advise.
Model selection is part of the work. In Week 1 I evaluate Claude, GPT, Gemini, open source, and self-hosted options against your privacy, cost, latency, and accuracy needs.
Embedded means embedded. I pair with your engineers on the build so they leave the month fluent. Most teams start the month sceptical and end it shipping AI without me.
You do. All of it. Standard work-for-hire terms. I'll sign your contract or use a standard one.
Month-to-month, for as long as it's useful. Some clients keep a day a week going long-term. Others run a few intensive months, then bring me back later for the next phase.
Usually within days of the intro call, sometimes the following Monday. Two fractional slots at most, so first come first served.
Your fractional CTO or Chief AI Officer, embedded in your business. Month-to-month.
Your senior technical voice, week in, week out.
In your team's weekly flow. Building, reviewing, steering.