Author
Igor Gazivoda
Founder & CEO at StepTo, scaling engineering teams and building AI-driven products.
Igor Gazivoda
Founder & CEO, StepTo
Igor is Founder & CEO of StepTo, and has 15+ years in software engineering and business development. Former CTO at a Series A fintech startup, he specializes in scaling engineering teams, nearshore strategy, and AI-driven product development. He holds a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Belgrade and has published on distributed systems architecture.
Nearshore StrategyEngineering LeadershipAI ProductsOutsourcing
Articles by Igor Gazivoda (165)
- 40% of Pull Requests Now Start With an Agent: What GitHub's Octoverse 2026 Means for Your Engineering Team · 11 min read
- Adding Agents to a Late Project Makes It Later: Brooks's Law in the Age of AI Coding · 12 min read
- Your IDE Stopped Choosing Your Coding Agent: What the Agent Client Protocol Changes for Engineering Teams · 12 min read
- It Took 9 Seconds: Why Your Backups Must Survive the Credentials Your AI Agent Holds · 11 min read
- "Code Must Not Be Reviewed by Humans": What the Dark Factory Gets Right, and Why Almost Nobody Runs One · 13 min read
- Your CI Was Sized for Humans: What Agent Load Is Doing to Pipelines, Main Branches and Delivery · 11 min read
- The Seat Was the Cheap Part: How to Budget AI Coding Spend Now That Every Developer Has a Meter · 11 min read
- Meta Just Made Its AI's Mistakes Your Fault. Your Other AI Vendors Got There First. · 11 min read
- Your Cheapest AI Model Now Comes With a Congressional Inquiry: Running Kimi, Qwen and DeepSeek in Production Under Scrutiny · 12 min read
- Your Agents Spend 80% of Their Time Waiting for You: Human Attention Is the New Engineering Bottleneck · 13 min read
- Your Agent Won't Stop Itself: What the Mythos 5 Incident Teaches About Building Brakes Into Long-Running AI Agents · 13 min read
- 30,903 Developers, One Message: AI Is Used Daily and Trusted Rarely. What the 2026 Stack Overflow Survey Means for Your Team · 11 min read
- Spring Boot 3.5 Is Out of Free Support and 4.0 Follows in December: A Java Upgrade Plan That Lands on the Right Version · 12 min read
- Your Insurer Just Wrote AI Out of the Policy. Most of Your Codebase Is Now Written by AI. · 13 min read
- Your AI Agent Remembers Everything. That Is Now Your Biggest Security and Compliance Problem. · 12 min read
- More Code, Fewer Deployments: Why Progressive Delivery Is the Missing Half of Your AI Coding Strategy · 14 min read
- Copilot Can Now Approve Your Pull Requests. Your Auditor Still Thinks a Human Did. · 13 min read
- Signed, Provenanced and Malicious: What the 2026 npm Worms Teach About Your Install Pipeline · 13 min read
- TypeScript 7 Is Here: A Practical Migration Plan for the Go-Native Compiler · 13 min read
- Tokenmaxxing Is Over. What Should Engineering Leaders Measure Instead of AI Usage? · 13 min read
- The Proof Got Cheap. The Specification Didn't: What AI-Driven Formal Verification Means for Your Engineering Team · 14 min read
- The Migration You Postponed for Five Years Now Takes Two Weeks. Here Is What Actually Makes It Work. · 14 min read
- Your Product Manager Just Opened a Pull Request. Who Owns the Code Now? · 13 min read
- Six of the Biggest IT Outsourcers Just Lost Their Green Card Pipeline. Your Delivery Plan Runs Through It. · 14 min read
- Your Certificates Expire Every 64 Days From February. Is Anything Actually Renewing Them? · 13 min read
- Meta Tried 50 Engineers per Manager. Six Months Later It Asked for Managers Back. · 12 min read
- Your Coding Agent Made the Tests Pass. That Is Not the Same as Making the Code Work. · 13 min read
- The Code Took a Morning. The Story Took a Week. How AI Coding Agents Broke Software Estimation · 13 min read
- Your SaaS Vendors Just Started Charging Your AI Agents to Read Your Own Data · 14 min read
- Your Chat Window Is a Tracking Surface: What the AI Assistant Privacy Study Means for Every Company Shipping a Chatbot · 13 min read
- Your Engineers Are Getting Faster and Weaker at the Same Time: The AI Deskilling Problem Nobody Budgets For · 11 min read
- The AI Layoff Reversal: Companies Are Rehiring the Engineers They Cut. Here's How to Rebuild Without Repeating the Mistake. · 11 min read
- Your Coding Agent Will Find a Way. In September 2026, the Way Was a Public GitHub Repo. · 12 min read
- 974 CVEs in One Patch Tuesday: AI Made Finding Bugs Cheap. Fixing Them Is Now Your Bottleneck. · 13 min read
- Your Coding Agent Is a Supplier Now: What the Cursor Cutoff Teaches About AI Tool Continuity · 13 min read
- PostgreSQL 14 Reaches End of Life on November 12. The Cloud Extended Support Meter Starts Soon After. · 13 min read
- Python 3.10 Reached End of Life in October 2026. Your Cloud Provider Pulls the Plug the Same Month. · 13 min read
- Android Now Asks Who Built Your App. Since September 30, "Our Agency Handles That" Is No Longer an Answer. · 13 min read
- .NET 8 and .NET 9 Both Reach End of Support on November 10. Your Upgrade Is an Engineering Project, Not a Version Bump. · 14 min read
- The '42% Are Abandoning Microservices' Statistic Is Not in the Survey. The Retreat Is Real Anyway. · 17 min read
- Your Fallback Plan Is a Retry Loop: What 2026's Outage Year Should Change About How You Build · 17 min read
- The Harness Is the Product: Why the Wrapper Around Your Coding Agent Now Outweighs the Model You Picked · 16 min read
- Your Agents Keep Making the Same Wrong Assumption. The Fix Is a Markdown File. · 18 min read
- Nobody Can Tell You How Many AI Agents Your Company Is Running. That Is the Whole Problem. · 17 min read
- Your Agents Run Code Nobody Read. What Is Actually Containing Them? · 15 min read
- Your Next RFP Will Ask for Grams of CO2 per Transaction. Your Stack Cannot Answer It. · 16 min read
- Hiring a Remote React/TypeScript Team: What Actually Changes vs. a Generalist Dedicated Team · 11 min read
- What a Developer in Serbia Actually Costs, by Role and Seniority (2026) · 9 min read
- How to Evaluate a Nearshore Software Company in Europe: A Buyer's Framework · 12 min read
- Your Engineering Job Ladder Is Now a Legal Document: The Pay Transparency Deadline Almost Nobody Prepared For · 16 min read
- Flutter, React Native, or Kotlin Multiplatform? The 2026 Mobile Decision That Outlives Your Team · 16 min read
- The Cancellation Button Is an Engineering Deliverable Now: What the Digital Fairness Act Will Ask Your Product Code to Prove · 17 min read
- Who Actually Builds RAG Systems? A Buyer's Guide to Evaluating a RAG Development Partner · 9 min read
- The Sync Engine Grew Up: Local-First Became an Architecture Decision in 2026, Not a Research Project · 18 min read
- The Supply Chain Clause: How NIS2 Enforcement Turned Your Development Partner Into a Compliance Dependency · 18 min read
- March 2029 Is an Engineering Deadline, Not a Policy Date: What the European Health Data Space Actually Makes You Build · 13 min read
- Your Agent Died at Step 41. It Had Already Charged the Customer. · 20 min read
- Outstaffing vs. Outsourcing vs. Staff Augmentation: What Actually Separates the Three Models · 5 min read
- IP and Code Ownership in Outsourced Development: What Your Contract Actually Needs to Say · 4 min read
- The Forward Deployed Engineer Boom: What the Hottest Job in AI Says About Your Delivery Gap · 17 min read
- The Model Ships With the App: What Moving AI Inference On-Device Actually Demands From Your Engineering Team · 18 min read
- Your AI Feature Has a Cost of Goods. Your Pricing Page Has No Idea. · 18 min read
- The Hypervisor Exit Is an Application Problem: What the VMware Migration Wave Is Really Costing Engineering Teams · 15 min read
- 88% of Leaked AWS Keys Still Work: The Credential Debt Your AI Agents Are Compounding · 15 min read
- Your RFP Now Demands an AI Certificate Roughly 350 Companies Hold · 16 min read
- Since 1 September 2026, Your French Invoices Are API Calls. Nobody Told Your Engineering Team. · 17 min read
- The AI Law Binding Your Product Isn't European. It's Texan, Coloradan and Californian. · 18 min read
- Your Cloud Exit Just Became Free. It Did Not Become Possible. · 17 min read
- You Bought a Vector Database in 2024. Your Postgres Can Probably Do It Now. · 16 min read
- The Office Mandate Is a Hiring Decision: What Five Days a Week Is Actually Costing Engineering Teams · 16 min read
- Your Voice Agent Has 800 Milliseconds. Everything Else Is a Negotiation With Physics · 19 min read
- Iceberg Won the Format War. Your Data Platform Still Is Not Ready for Agents · 15 min read
- Your Product Now Needs an API: What the Digital Product Passport Actually Makes You Build · 18 min read
- Half of Your S/4HANA Programme Is Ordinary Software Work. You Are Paying SAP Rates for All of It. · 18 min read
- Writing the Code Got Cheap. Landing It Did Not. What a Fleet of Coding Agents Actually Costs to Run · 15 min read
- Two Agents, Two Revenue Numbers: The Layer Your AI Analytics Stack Is Missing · 15 min read
- The AI Act Deadline Moved. The One That Applies to Your Product Didn't. · 17 min read
- The Maintainers Are Leaving: What the AI Slop Flood Means for the Code You Ship but Didn't Write · 18 min read
- You Are Paying More to Watch the System Than to Run It: The Observability Bill of the Agent Era · 17 min read
- Your Login Screen Has a Legal Deadline: What the EU Digital Identity Wallet Actually Makes You Build · 15 min read
- 5% of the GPU, All of the Bill: Running the Cloud Repatriation Decision on Numbers Instead of Ideology · 16 min read
- The Agent With a Mouse: Automating the Enterprise Systems That Never Got an API · 17 min read
- The Agent Took the Page. Someone Still Has to Approve the Rollback. · 17 min read
- The Memory Safety Deadline Already Passed. Your Buyers Just Started Asking About It. · 16 min read
- The Codebase You're Buying Was Written by a Machine: How AI Broke Technical Due Diligence · 17 min read
- A Customer You Cannot See Is Already Buying From You: The Engineering Work Behind Agentic Commerce · 14 min read
- Twice the Code, Half the QA: The Verification Math That Stopped Working in 2026 · 17 min read
- Your AI Agents Aren't the Bottleneck. Your Repository Is. · 15 min read
- Your Hiring Plan Is Not an Immigration Strategy: What the 2026 H-1B Whiplash Means for Engineering Teams · 16 min read
- Your Outsourcing Vendor Uses AI Now. Should You Still Be Paying Per Developer-Hour? · 14 min read
- How to Switch Software Development Vendors Without Losing Your Codebase · 13 min read
- Can You Hire a Developer Abroad as a Contractor? The Tax Risk Nobody Mentions · 13 min read
- Your Outsourced Developer Just Quit. What Your Contract Should Have Said About Replacements. · 12 min read
- Should Your Outsourced Developers Have Access to Production Data? · 12 min read
- On 9 December, Your Software Becomes a Product. Strict Liability Comes With It. · 18 min read
- The Other DORA: Europe Just Turned Your Development Partner Into a Supervised Dependency · 18 min read
- Data Residency Was the Easy Part: What Europe's Sovereignty Rules Now Demand From Your Engineering Team · 14 min read
- The Eval Gap: Why Your AI Features Ship Without a Test Suite, and What That's Costing You · 17 min read
- A French Court Just Ruled That 71% Accessible Is Not Accessible. Your AI Wrote the Other 29%. · 17 min read
- You Cannot Switch Models. That Is the Problem, and It Cost the Average Enterprise $315,000 to Find Out · 11 min read
- The CRA's 24-Hour Clock Started September 11. Most Software Teams Think They Have Until 2027. · 12 min read
- Post-Quantum Cryptography Is a Refactoring Project, Not a Security Purchase · 10 min read
- Your AI Coding Agent Reads Untrusted Input All Day. In 2026, Attackers Started Writing To It. · 11 min read
- Python or TypeScript for Your AI Product? The Honest Answer Is Both, and the Boundary Is the Decision · 10 min read
- The Firmware Is the Cheap Part: What a Connected Product Actually Costs Once You Owe It Five Years of Updates · 11 min read
- The Copilot Tax: Why AI Coding Tools Just Became the Least Predictable Line Item in Your Engineering Budget · 12 min read
- Three Minutes to Underwrite, Conformity Assessment by August: The Two Deadlines Insurance Engineering Teams Are Running Against · 11 min read
- The GPL Time Bomb: Why AI-Generated Code Is a Licensing Liability Nobody's Auditing For · 12 min read
- Staff Augmentation Fails in Week Three, Not Month Six: The Onboarding Playbook Nobody Writes Down · 11 min read
- The Multiplier Nobody Quotes: Why Outsourcing Can Cost 60% More Than the Rate You Agreed · 12 min read
- Serbia, Poland or Romania? The Nearshore Comparison That Actually Decides Your Engagement · 12 min read
- Go, Node or Java in 2026: Your Backend Language Choice Is Now a Cloud Bill Decision · 12 min read
- North Korean IT Worker Fraud: The Deepfake Hiring Risk · 12 min read
- Symfony or Laravel in 2026: You Are Choosing a Ten-Year Maintenance Contract, Not a Framework · 12 min read
- Dedicated Development Team Cost in 2026: Real Numbers · 9 min read
- What an iOS App Actually Costs in 2026, and the Four Line Items Missing From Your Quote · 13 min read
- The Hardware Bill Comes Due: How the Memory Shortage Turned Efficiency Back Into an Engineering Requirement · 16 min read
- React vs Vue for Enterprise SaaS in 2026: How to Actually Make the Call · 7 min read
- Who Owns Your Code? How to Protect Your IP When Hiring a Software Development Agency · 6 min read
- The Real Cost of Custom Software Nobody Talks About (Until the Invoice Arrives) · 7 min read
- Why Custom AI Quotes Range From $5,000 to $500,000, and What You Should Actually Be Paying · 9 min read
- Fixed Price or Time and Materials? How to Protect Yourself When Signing a Software Development Contract · 6 min read
- Technical Co-Founder vs. Software Development Agency: What Solo Founders Get Wrong in 2026 · 6 min read
- Staff Augmentation vs. Software Development Agency: What's the Difference, and Which Model Is Right for You · 5 min read
- The Agentic Organization: What McKinsey's Next Operating-Model Shift Means for How You Build Software · 8 min read
- Three Quarters of Small Businesses Are Using AI. Why Only 14% Are Getting Real Results. · 8 min read
- Fractional CTO or Software Development Agency? How to Make the Right Call for Your Business · 7 min read
- Your Vibe-Coded App Is Live. Now the Real Problems Start. · 7 min read
- How to Vet a Software Development Agency Before You Sign Anything · 5 min read
- You Have Years of Business Data. Your AI Tools Can't See Any of It. · 5 min read
- How to Find a Software Development Agency That Won't Disappear After Launch · 5 min read
- Your AI Automation Is Running, and Silently Getting Things Wrong · 6 min read
- Every Agency Claims to Do AI. Here's How to Tell Which Ones Actually Can. · 7 min read
- Dedicated Development Team vs. Project-Based Outsourcing: Which Model Is Right for Your Business? · 9 min read
- You're Paying for 5 SaaS Tools That Don't Talk to Each Other. Here's When to Build Custom Software Instead. · 7 min read
- When AI Tools Aren't Enough: 5 Signs Your Business Needs Custom AI Development · 7 min read
- Why 95% of Companies See No Return on GenAI, and How to Make Sure Yours Does · 7 min read
- What to Ask Your Software Agency at Every Stage of the Project (A Non-Technical Checklist) · 6 min read
- Why Software Projects Go Over Budget, and How to Find a Development Partner Who Won't Let It Happen · 7 min read
- Agency Bandwidth Is Luck of the Draw. Here's What Business Owners Are Learning the Hard Way. · 7 min read
- You Adopted AI. Why Isn't It Working? The Integration Gap Costing Your Business Real Money · 6 min read
- How to Hire a Software Development Agency Without Getting Burned (Again) · 7 min read
- What Is a Discovery Phase in Software Development, and Should You Pay for One? · 6 min read
- Your AI Project Has Been 'Almost Ready' for Six Months. Here's What's Actually Wrong. · 7 min read
- How to Find a Software Development Agency You Can Actually Trust · 7 min read
- Hire a Developer, Use an Agency, or Buy a Tool? How to Make the Right Call on AI Automation for Your Business · 6 min read
- The No-Code Ceiling: When Your Business Outgrows Bubble, Airtable, and Zapier · 7 min read
- How to Know If Your Software Agency Is Doing Good Work (When You Can't Read Code) · 6 min read
- 7 Red Flags to Watch for Before You Hire a Software Development Agency · 8 min read
- How to Write a Software Project Brief (Even If You're Not Technical) · 8 min read
- What to Automate First: A Business Owner's Guide to AI That Actually Pays Off · 8 min read
- The Open Source Breaking Point: AI Agents Are Flooding Maintainers, and Your Engineering Team Is Part of the Problem · 12 min read
- The AI ROI Reckoning: Why Your Board Is Right to Ask Hard Questions, and How Engineering Leaders Should Answer · 11 min read
- The Autonomous PR: What Happens to Software Engineering When AI Agents Take Jira Tickets All the Way to Merged Code · 15 min read
- The 80/20 Outsourcing Inversion: Why AI Writing Your Code Has Made Senior Engineers More Expensive · 13 min read
- The AI-Native Pod: What Meta's Leaked Memo Reveals About the Engineering Org Chart of 2026 · 11 min read
- The Thinking Machine Problem: What Reasoning Models Actually Change About How You Build Software · 12 min read
- The Open Source AI Fork: Why Enterprise Software Strategy Just Split Into Two Irreversible Camps · 12 min read
- The 4.5x Problem: Why Your AI Agents Have Too Much Access, and What That's Already Costing You · 12 min read
- Your Sprints Are Faster. Your Releases Aren't. Here's Why AI Coding Tools Are Hitting a Wall · 11 min read
- The AI Workforce Paradox: What Tech Layoffs and a Simultaneous Hiring Boom Mean for Engineering Leaders · 11 min read
- Context Engineering: The Hidden Discipline Separating AI Teams That Ship from Those That Stall · 11 min read
- How to Build a Dedicated Software Team in 2026: A Step-by-Step Guide for Engineering Leaders · 14 min read
- The Junior Developer Extinction: Who Will Build Your Senior Engineers in 2026? · 7 min read
- The Nearshore Inflection Point: Why European Enterprises Are Abandoning Offshore in 2026 · 6 min read
