Know why your team is stuck. Before you have to explain it.
A rapid technical audit of your codebase and cloud infrastructure that gives you a straight answer to the question your team can't quite give you. Most engagements complete in days.
You've been told engineering is shipping. Your lived experience says otherwise.
Every roadmap update sounds reasonable. Every status report has green checkmarks. But the velocity isn't there. Cloud bills keep climbing. Every “small change” turns into a six-week project. You can't name what's wrong and asking directly puts your CTO on the defensive.
You're not wrong about the problem. You just don't have the language for it. And you can't get that language from the people whose work you're evaluating.
- ✕Updates written by the people whose work you're trying to evaluate
- ✕Promised dates that slip without a clear technical reason
- ✕Cloud spend that grows faster than headcount
- ✕"It's complicated" as the answer to most questions
- ✕A board that wants specifics you can't provide
- ✕Headcount and runway decisions made on partial information
- ✕A growing gap between what leadership thinks is built and what actually exists
- ✓A read on your system that doesn't depend on internal narrative
- ✓Specific reasons changes take as long as they do, with evidence
- ✓Cloud cost breakdown with concrete savings opportunities
- ✓Plain-language answers, sourced to what's actually deployed
- ✓A 12–15 page brief written for business leaders, not engineers
- ✓A 30/60/90 prioritized action list, not a wish list
- ✓Validation or invalidation of the hypothesis you can't say out loud
Three outputs. Three audiences. One source of truth.
Every Ground Truth engagement produces three aligned deliverables so the conversation you have with your board, the conversation you have with your CTO, and the work your engineering team picks up are all reading from the same page.
Executive Brief
- →What your business is actually running, in plain English
- →Where engineering time and cloud spend are going, and why
- →What's slowing your team, with specific, sourced reasons
- →Cloud cost breakdown and savings opportunities
- →A 30/60/90 prioritized action list
- →What to fix first to reduce operational and financial risk
Technical Deep Dive
- →Architecture diagrams generated from actual code
- →Security exposure map with credentials, API keys, and attack surface
- →Service coupling analysis and cascade failure risk
- →Dead code, technical debt, and dependency risk quantification
- →Team velocity inhibitors identified in the codebase itself
Cost & Risk Summary
- →Cloud spend breakdown by service and project
- →Identified waste and over-provisioning, quantified
- →Security and compliance exposures with business impact
- →Vendor and dependency concentration risk
- →Hire-ramp and bus-factor exposure on critical systems
Read-only access. Claims checked against what's actually running.
We read directly from your codebase, your cloud account, and your database — the things that can't lie. Your team's slides and status reports are useful context, but not the source of truth. We treat their description of the system as one input. The system itself is the other.
Seasoned operators backed by 100+ concurrent read-only AI agents. The agents do the broad crawl across millions of lines of code and infrastructure config. Experienced humans review every finding, validate against context, and turn the output into a brief leadership can trust.
What we tend to find when we look.
These are the categories that surface repeatedly when the analysis reads the actual system instead of relying on assumptions or stale documentation. Your specific findings will vary, but the kinds of findings are predictable.
Cloud overspend identified on average. Unused resources, over-provisioned instances, and duplicated services that have accumulated over years. Often enough to cover the engagement fee.
Average portion of the codebase that is dead, deprecated, or untested. This is what your team is wading through every time they make a small change. Directly linked to slow ship velocity and slow ramp time on new hires.
Credentials, API keys, and secrets committed directly into production code. Found in most codebases we look at. Creates breach liability and complicates future financing or M&A diligence.
Critical systems that depend on one person, one undocumented service, or one fragile integration. The kind of thing nobody mentions until it breaks. We find them by reading dependency graphs, not by asking.
See what you'd actually receive.
The sample brief shows the report structure: executive summary, prioritized findings, cloud cost analysis, risk scorecard, and 30/60/90 action list. Written so you can hand it to your board on a Friday and have a different conversation with your CTO on Monday.
Minimal access. Human-led. Delivered in days.
Read-only credentials
GitHub read-only token, AWS Cost Explorer read access, and a database dump. Your IT or engineering lead handles setup in under an hour.
100+ AI agents deployed
Purpose-built agents run concurrently across the codebase and cloud: architecture mapping, cost analysis, security scanning, dependency analysis, and dead code detection. Hours, not weeks.
Senior operator review
Seasoned senior operators review every agent finding before it goes in the brief. The agents are the force multiplier; experienced humans validate, contextualize, and translate technical findings into business language.
Brief + working session
You receive the Executive Brief, the Technical Deep Dive, and the Cost & Risk Summary, plus a working session with our team to walk through findings and prioritize next steps.
“I've been wondering how this worked for two years since I got here. It diagrammed it better than I would have.”
Ground Truth is often the first step.
Tech Debt Modernization
Once you have the picture, we help you act on it. AI-accelerated modernization that runs alongside your product roadmap without pausing the business.
AI Readiness
For teams adding AI features or AI-assisted development. We help you put evaluation and guardrails in place before AI-generated changes reach production.
Get a straight answer.
A 30-minute briefing is enough to know whether Ground Truth is the right starting point. We'll ask about your current situation, walk through what we'd look at, and tell you honestly whether this is the right fit.