Variant Systems

Blog

Thoughts on product engineering, building startups, and the craft of software development.

March 23, 2026

Intuition Is the New Headcount

The old model sold hours and bodies. The new one needs three people with deep judgment and AI-powered execution. Here's why intuition — earned through years of building, breaking, and rebuilding — is now the highest-value asset in software.

ai startup teams leadership hiring

March 13, 2026

The Cost of Delegation

Agents execute at scale. Accountability doesn't transfer. The founder who delegates everything to AI doesn't become a CEO with thousands of staff — they become an accountability sink.

ai-agents startup leadership accountability

February 26, 2026

Claude Code Audit: 5 Real Projects, 5 Hidden Failures

We audited 5 SaaS apps built with Claude Code. The code looked senior-level — but auth, error handling, and data integrity were silently broken. What to check in yours.

claude-code code-audit ai-generated-code security startup

February 23, 2026

PostGIS: Building Location-Aware Applications

Practical guide to PostGIS, spatial indexing, and H3 — turn address columns into spatial queries for delivery routing and territory analysis.

gis postgis postgresql geospatial architecture

February 23, 2026

React Native Skia Shaders: Uniforms, useDerivedValue & Reanimated (With Examples)

Step-by-step guide to Skia shader uniforms with Reanimated shared values and useDerivedValue. Includes working examples for GPU animations, custom charts, and gesture-driven effects.

react-native skia mobile animation graphics

February 22, 2026

BEAM OTP: Why Everyone Keeps Reinventing It

What makes BEAM and OTP different from async/await, threads, and actors. Process isolation, supervisors, and why Erlang's model keeps winning 40 years later.

elixir beam otp concurrency actor-model erlang

February 14, 2026

Free Claude Code Audit Plugin: 7 Analyzers

Open-source Claude Code plugin that scans any codebase for secrets, security issues, dependency risks, and test coverage. Install in one command.

claude-code code-audit open-source ai-tools

February 13, 2026

PhoenixPress: Compile-Time SEO for Phoenix Apps

We open-sourced PhoenixPress - sitemaps, robots.txt, and RSS feeds for Phoenix, generated at compile time with zero runtime overhead.

elixir phoenix seo open-source

February 12, 2026

Due Diligence for AI-Generated Codebases

How to evaluate AI-built and vibe-coded startups before acquisition. What traditional technical due diligence misses and what your deal team needs to check.

vibe-coding due-diligence AI investors code-audit

February 10, 2026

Pre-Acquisition Code Review: A Buyer's Guide

What to check before buying a software company. A practical guide to pre-acquisition code review for M&A teams and CTOs.

M&A acquisition code-review due-diligence software

February 8, 2026

Technical Due Diligence for Software Acquisitions

Technical due diligence guide for software acquisitions. Architecture, security, AI-generated code, and what your deal team needs to know.

technical-due-diligence M&A code-audit acquisition software

February 5, 2026

How We Built a pSEO Engine with Claude

Our playbook for building hundreds of programmatic SEO pages without leaving Claude Code - research, strategy, and the gotchas nobody warns you about.

pseo claude-code seo ai-tools content-strategy

November 15, 2025

React Native Background Audio for AI

How we built hour-long session recording in React Native with expo-audio, direct S3 uploads, and an AI transcription pipeline.

react-native expo audio ai mobile

October 29, 2025

Phoenix LiveView Calendar with Drag-and-Drop

Step-by-step guide to building a production calendar in Phoenix LiveView — data model, recurring events, multi-user views, drag-and-drop, and performance.

elixir phoenix liveview calendar

February 2, 2025

Dynamic App Icons in Expo

How we built an open-source package for switching app icons at runtime in Expo apps. Works on iOS and Android.

react-native expo mobile open-source

October 1, 2024

AI-Empowered, Not AI-Enabled

Our thesis on why the future belongs to engineers who use AI as leverage - not companies that use AI as a crutch.

thesis ai engineering