Position
Seven positions,
one page.
Each one is a belief and what it costs us to hold it. If you disagree with the first two, you will disagree with the engagement, and it is better to find that out here.
Strategy without delivery is worthless.
You can buy a good recommendation cheaply, and plenty of them are worth the money.
Granted. Then the slide gets filed, and the thing it described is still unbuilt. A recommendation only turns out true or false when something runs, and by then most engagements are over. We wrote one down in December 2024 and defended it against an outside review that wanted us off Cloudflare D1. Production disproved it thirteen months later.
The same people who picked that database moved it to Postgres in January 2026, before the global launch rather than after it. That is what you are buying: the decision, and what came of it.
AI is an operating model, not a feature.
The capability changes what a company can look like, not only what it can ship.
Most firms bolt a model onto the process they already run, then wonder why the quarter looks the same. That is an easy trap to fall into, because software is what vendors sell and structure is what nobody can invoice for. The change that pays sits upstream of the code. Kickgeist, our World Cup prediction game, has no API tier: the app talks to Postgres directly, and row-level security is the whole authorisation boundary. 25 tables, 51 database functions, 48 policies.
So when agents arrived over MCP, the seven tools ran under the policies a phone already runs under. Adding an agent interface was an interface problem rather than a security one, and the architecture had settled that before anyone wrote a line.
Direction is the scarce skill.
Skill used to be scarce and had to be recruited; now it can be directed instead.
You are being asked to let a model write code that lands in your repositories, and that is the right thing to worry about. Direction is the answer, and you can check it. Our planning matrix carries roughly 6,550 Flutter tests and 930 Deno tests, green on every commit, with the doctrine written before the features.
docker-base, the base image four public repositories build on, runs Hadolint, Container Structure Tests and Docker Scout on every build, across five platforms. What you get is the capacity to produce, and it keeps producing after we go.
Hiring is the slowest thing you do.
The bottleneck sits in the calendar, not in the talent market.
A hire is permanent, which is an advantage we will never have, and you should weigh it. It is also three to six months away, and the date on your board slide is closer than that. An organisation that measures capacity in people moves at the speed it can hire.
We do not do staff augmentation, because a rented head leaves when the person does. What you are adding is capacity you own, on a date you control rather than a date a candidate picks.
Gates outlast good intentions.
Correctness that depends on someone paying attention is luck with good manners.
You will hear that gates slow a team down, and at the start they do. Then the release you were dreading becomes a command instead of an afternoon. docker-base signs with Cosign, publishes an SBOM and provenance, and rebuilds itself every day at 10:00 UTC.
Tags are CalVer dates and they are kept, so a build pinned last March still resolves today. What we hand over carries the checks that keep it true after we stop looking at it.
Over-engineering is a vice unless it is aimed.
Aim is the whole difference between care and waste.
Most of the time over-engineering is a real vice, and the people who call it out are right. The question to ask is what the mistake would cost to undo. Where a decision is cheap to reverse, so is the right amount of care. Where reversing it means rewriting everything built on top, the care belongs at the front.
A string catalogue is the case we argue from. Written after the screens, a second language is a rewrite of all of them; written first, a language is a data change. We wrote it first, and the app ships 29 languages across 35 locale files.
Show the work, or show nothing.
Your first question is whether this has been done before, for somebody like you.
We will not name a client to answer it, and we know that costs you the fastest answer there is. What replaces the logo is an artefact you can open for yourself. Five public repositories under our organisation on GitHub publish 31 container images, pulled 14,970,732 times, measured on 6 August 2026.
The oldest was created in August 2015 and still rebuilds itself every day. Two products carry the rest of the argument: one that ran in front of a live audience, and one still pre-launch. And the firm you hire keeps the same silence about your name, on the day that matters to you.
Four debriefs carry the decisions behind these numbers, and what they cost.
One mail. No form.
Tell us what is in the way.
Say what you're building and where it stopped.
Copy it into your mail client if that is easier.
The draft opens with
- What you are building
- What is in the way
- The stack
- When you want to start
The contact page says who answers, and what the reply contains.