Six months into running my consultancy, I had hired six people.
— from “Why I unhired five people.”Essays on AI architecture, honest billing, and the craft of building software as a solo operator.
10 essays · Engineering · Practice · AI
What I'm writing about.
Essays on AI architecture, honest billing, and the craft of building software as a solo operator. Written between client work, published when they're true.
10 essays · Engineering · Practice · AI
The archive
Showing 10 field notes.
From GDPR to the EU AI Act.
The IT services firms that built GDPR compliance muscle between 2015 and 2018 spent the next eight years charging premium fees. The EU AI Act creates the same dynamic — and the bridge from a data-governance practice to an AI-governance practice is shorter than it looks.
Practice9 minWhy I unhired five people.
Six months in I had hired six people. Eighteen months later, five were gone — by my hand, with regret. The lesson is the foundation of every engagement I run today.
Practice9 minBuilt with care. Billed with clarity: a thesis.
Most agency taglines are aspiration. This one is operations. Five rules of care, four rules of clarity, and the architecture they create together.
AI11 minEval harnesses are the new test suite.
Unit tests tell you when your code does something different. Eval harnesses tell you when your model is doing something worse. Why AI features need both.
Engineering6 minThe window you give the client.
Most agencies ship a status email. I ship a portal. Same hours, same work — but the cost of one is your trust, and the cost of the other is a single afternoon of engineering.
Practice5 minOn shipping: a discipline, not a verb.
Calendar, ops, vendors, the production chain held in one head. What production management taught me before I called it shipping — and why software still gets the word wrong.
Engineering12 minWhat I learned from one million accounts.
Two years as tech lead at a fintech that scaled past a million accounts. The lesson wasn't about scale. It was about the difference between code that runs and code that earns trust.
AI8 minNaming the AI agents you use.
Most agencies hide their AI use behind handwaving. Naming each agent — its model, its job, its honest limitations — turns out to be a competitive moat.
Engineering7 minThe portal as first principle.
Every client engagement starts with provisioning a portal — before the contract, before the kickoff, before the first line of code. Why infrastructure precedes everything else.
Practice8 minCapacity versus continuity.
Two business models, two unit economics, two different markets. Why agencies sell what's easy to scale — and why operators sell what's easier to defend.