Right now, every startup pitch deck says “AI-powered.” Every founder wants an agent. Every board is asking why the product doesn’t have a chatbot yet. But somewhere between the hype and the actual shipping of software, a whole lot of money, time, and common sense is getting lost.
That’s the world Garrett Fritz lives in every day. As a Partner and CTO at MetaCTO, Garrett works as a fractional CTO for companies ranging from scrappy early-stage startups to compliance-heavy mid-market enterprises, the kind of people who need someone to tell them the truth about what AI can and can’t do for their product.
In this episode of SaaS That App – Building Tech-Enabled Businesses, Garrett joined Aaron Marchbanks and Justin Edwards to share his two guiding principles of software development: “Nobody Reads” and “The Previous Guy Wasn’t an Idiot.”
Two Principles That Should Govern Every Tech Decision
Garrett operates by two simple rules.
The first: “Nobody Reads.” Not your documentation, not your specs, not your beautifully crafted onboarding flow. Users won’t read it, and honestly, your own team probably won’t either. The implication isn’t to stop writing. It’s to stop relying on writing as your primary communication tool. Build intuitive interfaces, have real conversations, and find creative ways to make your product explain itself without walls of text.
This matters even more now, because the explosion of AI-generated content has made people even more numb to blocks of text. Everyone’s scrolling past it. If your product blends into the “AI slop,” you’re already lost.
His second principle: “The Previous Guy Wasn’t an Idiot.” When Garrett steps into a new CTO engagement, his first move is to ask questions. Why were decisions made? Where are the bodies buried, and what put them there?
He learned this the hard way in his twenties, when he once deployed a shiny new platform and promptly heard from furious customers who needed their old CSV upload workflow, something his “better” interface didn’t support. The lesson stuck: understand before you prescribe.
Half the “AI Companies” Out There Are Just Fancy If Statements
Garrett estimates that every startup walking through his door in the last six months claims to be an AI company, but roughly half of them are building something that doesn’t actually need AI at all.
The chatbot they want? Their users could just use ChatGPT. The data insights they’re chasing? That’s a SQL query, not a machine learning pipeline. His advice is to get to the root of the problem first. If the answer is a well-written database query and a chart, don’t spend two weeks and thousands of dollars wiring up an agentic workflow to do the same thing.
The Token Bill Is Coming and It’s Going to Hurt
Here’s the part that should make every vibe-coding founder sit up straight. The era of flat-rate, all-you-can-eat AI tokens is ending. Platforms like Copilot are already shifting to usage-based pricing, and the reason is simple: they’re hemorrhaging money.
Garrett painted a vivid picture of how fast costs spiral: connect an uncapped API key to a GitHub repo for automated pull request reviews, and you can burn through $10,000 on work that has nothing to do with your actual product.
His recommendation: put a hard cap on your token spend today. The platforms make it easy to raise the limit if you genuinely need to, but without one, you’re one runaway integration away from a very expensive surprise.
Governed Agents: The Real Enterprise AI Play
For companies with actual compliance requirements, the wild-west approach to AI simply doesn’t work. Garrett sees the real opportunity in governed agent access: enabling non-technical staff to leverage agentic AI across company systems without sacrificing data security or compliance.
It’s not the most attractive pitch, but it’s where real enterprise value lives, and it’s a world apart from the “just hook a chatbot to everything” approach that dominates startup conversations.
Final Thoughts
Garrett’s closing advice? Try the tools, get a feel for the landscape, but don’t kid yourself into thinking you’ll catch up to experienced engineers just by prompting harder. AI is enabling everyone, including your competitors. A cheap consultation with someone who knows the space can save you months of wasted effort and thousands in unnecessary token spend. Take the test drive, but maybe don’t back all the way out of the driveway just yet.
Garrett’s Background
Garrett Fritz is a Partner and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at MetaCTO, a firm focused on building, growing, and monetizing mobile apps. He specializes in helping non-technical founders and business leaders develop scalable mobile and AI solutions through digital transformations. As Partner and CTO at MetaCTO, Garrett combines his MIT aerospace engineering background with extensive entrepreneurial experience to deliver exceptional mobile and AI solutions for clients.
Listen to the new episode on:
- Apple Podcast: https://tinyurl.com/3r8pe2de
- Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/9s4pwzzt
- YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/2p9t2325