Cto In A Box

CTO in a Box

An opinionated operating playbook and bootstrapper for new software products.

CTO in a Box captures the order of operations, artifacts, guardrails, and automation that tend to compound over a product's lifetime — and packages them so a new project can start with the right defaults instead of relearning them under pressure.

It is two things:

1. `CTO-IN-A-BOX.md` — a written playbook describing a phase-gated operating model (local MVP → deployed demo → production baseline → scale → reusable platform).
2. `cto-bootstrap.sh` — a zero-dependency Bash script that asks a short set of high-leverage questions, writes a manifest, and optionally scaffolds a workspace and starter templates that reflect the answers.

The first useful version of the script deliberately does **not** create cloud resources, GitHub repos, or secrets. It prints a plan and writes files you can read, commit, and iterate on.

Who this is for

• Founders and early CTOs about to start a new product and who want a sane default shape for repos, branches, CI, and ops.
• Platform engineers who have built this operating system by hand more than once and want to stop doing that.
• Teams moving from a local MVP to a deployed demo to a real production baseline, who want the jump to be a checklist rather than an improvisation.

It is **not** a stack brochure. The opinions (Railway for early deploy → AWS + Terraform + ECS for production, TypeScript + Bun + Hono + Prisma, Next.js, Expo, GitHub Actions) exist because repeated decisions compound and platform variance has a real tax — but they are overridable when a real constraint justifies it.

Quickstart

Requirements:

• Bash 4+
• Python 3 (used for template rendering)

Clone and run the interactive bootstrapper:

git clone https://github.com/ACNoonan/cto-in-a-box.git
cd cto-in-a-box
./cto-bootstrap.sh

The questionnaire adapts to the phase you pick. At Phase 0 (Local MVP) you ans