Notes from someone who ships AI-built software

Make AI work for your business,without breaking the bank.

Anyone can prompt an AI into a demo.

5 gated stages8.0/10 min score to ship~90% of the bill is avoidable2 new essays a week

The gated pipeline, live

Click a stage. Each one answers a single question, and nothing moves forward until the answer is yes.

Stage 1 · I approve

Discover data

Q: Is the data provably correct?

An agent inventories candidate tables, profiles the data, and hunts for a better source. It must reproduce a known-true anchor number to the penny before anything advances.

0%

Cost-per-outcome, not cost-per-token

Send the easy work to a cheaper model and save the expensive one for hard thinking. Drag the sliders.

5,000
20%

Cheap model $0.02/task, top model $0.30/task. Rates are generic placeholders to show the mechanism, not any provider's real pricing.

Tiered monthly cost
$380
All on top model: $1,500
You save $1,120/mo (75%) by routing the easy 80% to a cheaper model.

All writing

Two a week. Pipeline, cost, data, and how to actually work with AI.

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July 21, 2026 · 10 min read

Quality gates that keep AI-generated code honest

AI writes plausible-but-wrong code at high speed. These automated gates — scoring, smoke tests, visual review, a pre-push hook — stop it from shipping.

aiqualitytestingci
July 21, 2026 · 14 min read

How I run a gated build pipeline for AI-generated production apps

AI can write a whole app in an afternoon. The hard part is making sure the app is correct, safe, and maintainable. Here's the gated pipeline I use to get there on the first build instead of the fifteenth.

aipipelineproductionworkflow
July 18, 2026 · 9 min read

Give your AI a memory so you stop re-explaining yourself

A small file-based memory turns a forgetful assistant into one that compounds — better output, fewer tokens, no more repeating yourself every session.

aiworkflowproductivitycontext
July 14, 2026 · 10 min read

Prove the data before you write a line of app code

The most expensive AI app failures are data failures. A data-contract gate — with a reproducible anchor number — stops them cold.

aidataqualitysnowflake
July 7, 2026 · 11 min read

The app-factory pattern for internal data apps

Stop hand-building one-off internal dashboards. Scaffold them from templates so auth, health, branding, and deploys are identical every time.

aiarchitectureplatformdata-apps
June 30, 2026 · 9 min read

Real AI leverage without blowing your budget

How a solo operator or small team gets outsized results from AI while keeping the monthly bill boringly small.

aicostsmall-businessproductivity