All posts

Before you pay $500 for an audit, you should see what comes back. Here's a sample built from a real AI-built codebase, details changed: six findings with severity, a keep, fix or replace verdict for each, and a plan with one fixed price per phase.

Most RAG projects start with a folder of documents, not a user problem. Before you build an index, answer four questions: is the answer in your documents, does the text fit in the prompt, who may see what, and is finding the source really the hard part.

You don't need to read every file of a vibe-coded SaaS to know how it was built. Eleven greps, about thirty minutes: six show how the project was run, five find damage that breaks production or leaks data. Commands included.

Irresistible Bot took one month and $5,000. That budget doesn't buy an AI strategy. It buys one job done well. Here's the four-part test for which jobs fit in 30 days, and what we'd tell you not to build at that price.

AI vendors say output varies, so the price can't be fixed. The output does vary. The test you judge it by doesn't have to. A narrow acceptance test in four parts turns an open-ended AI project into one both sides can price and sign off.

We write production code with AI agents every day, and we get hired to take over codebases that agents wrote with nobody steering. The tool is the same. Here is what we hand the agent, what never leaves a human, and the one rule behind both.

Four public, sourced vibe-coding incidents from March 2025 to early 2026: a paywall enforced in the browser, apps with open databases, an AI agent that wiped production, and a leaked database key. Only one is known to have died. Here is what broke in each.

Picking one tool for a whole workflow is the mistake. Split it into steps first. Rules go in code, plumbing between systems goes in a workflow tool like n8n, and a model handles only the steps that are genuinely ambiguous. Here's how to tell which is which.

AI coding tools make the same mistakes because they get asked the same questions. Here are the seven defects we look for first in a vibe-coded app, from paywalls enforced in the browser to AI features with unguarded tools, and a check for each.

The deadline slipped twice and the Slack went quiet. Stalled agency projects tend to stall the same way, and the signs show up months early. Here are the five patterns, a five-minute check, and what to do when three of them match.

Coaching platforms are being told to add an AI coach. We'd build the opposite first: automate the admin around each session and leave the coaching to the coach. Here's the split we use, from five years of building Coaching Genie with Milana Leshinsky.

Founders keep paying agencies that stopped shipping because firing them feels harsh. They were paid and they didn't deliver. Here is the email to send, the four things to have ready first, and what to do the morning after.

What happens in the two weeks between letting the old team go and a working production deploy. Day by day: what the audit checks, what you own by day 3, what ships first, and the three steps founders most often skip.

When AI copy sounds generic, teams lengthen the prompt. The model doesn't need more adjectives. It needs facts about each customer's offer and audience, plus samples of how they write, collected up front. Here is how to structure that context, and how Irresistible Bot does it.

The platform worked in the demo and was signing institutions. Underneath, authorization was broken, organizations could see each other's data, uploads failed, there was no deploy process, keys were hardcoded and there were no tests. Here is what we found and six checks for yours.

Xperiencify's AWS bill went from $10,000 to $2,000 a month in 14 days. Nothing was migrated and nothing was rewritten. We removed what nobody used and made the database do less work. Here is the method and the checklist we use.

A demo proves the model can do the job once, for you, on data you picked. Production asks whether it does the job for every customer, using only their data, at a cost you can carry. Here are the six gaps we check before an AI feature leaves beta.

SportsID gives an athlete one permanent record that travels from camp to college. CoachID hires coaches off the same idea. Two products, one identity underneath, and that underneath part is where the engineering actually lives.

WooCommerce got Idlecorp's store live in a weekend. It couldn't get them past a plugin-stacked checkout and recommendations that didn't actually personalize anything. Here's why we moved the whole platform to Saleor.

Midway through building Sales Leverage, the founder's personal situation made it impossible to keep funding the build on schedule. We shipped it anyway. He paid in full once he could.

Most engagement contracts assign IP to the client. Most agencies still gatekeep the code on the way out. Here are the seven things to demand before you sign off the final invoice, and the order to demand them in.

A company gave every engineer unlimited Claude Code and put up a leaderboard for who burned the most tokens. The post is at 1,000 upvotes. The top comments are about gaming the leaderboard. The leaderboard is the product.

Most agency quotes are still pretending it's 2023. Here's what an MVP actually costs in 2026: five tiers, what each one ships, where the price comes from, and the work we won't take at the bottom of the range.

Three weeks, one engineer, both stores. The exact day-by-day timeline of a mobile MVP we shipped this spring, what we cut to make the window, and what we'd do differently next time.

The cheapest tier in our quote sheet. What ships, what doesn't, the stack we don't negotiate on at this price, and the kind of founder this is wrong for.

We've shipped 30+ production builds with Claude Code as a primary tool in the last six months. Here's what works, what gets people in trouble, the exact prompt patterns we use, and what the monthly bill looks like.

A senior engineer in 2026 is more expensive (year-one outlay) and harder to find (60 to 90 day pipelines). A senior engagement is cheaper and starts in a week. The math everyone uses for this decision is out of date. Here's the current version.

About one in five founders ask. We always say no. The reasoning isn't about loving the cap table. It's about what equity does to incentives on a 2–8 week engagement, and what we ask for instead.

Most RAG implementations we audit in 2026 still ship naive embedding-cosine retrieval. They work for the demo and break for users. Here's the current bar for production RAG, hybrid search, reranking, citation-required prompts, evals that catch regressions.

He didn't tell us right away. He kept sending short replies. Apologizing for the delay. Saying things would clear up soon. For weeks, we assumed it was a cash flow problem -- the kind every early-stage founder runs into at some point.

Every startup founder eventually faces a production outage, a security breach, or a server bill that makes no sense. Here's why a monthly website support plan is the one investment most skip -- and the one they regret skipping most.

Tired of clients writing site is down again? We fixed this for SaaS teams with Gitops + AWS + Kubernetes + ArgoCD = 99.99% uptime and an AWS bill cut from $10,000 to $2,000 a month.

Coaches and course creators want to scale without sacrificing their time. Vrinda Normand did it by building an AI copywriting agent trained on her own voice and methodology. Here's how.

Spectrum UI lets our engineers ship pixel-perfect interfaces fast without rebuilding common UI patterns from scratch. Here's why it's become our default for MVPs and SaaS apps, and what to watch out for.

Milana Leshinsky had a problem. As the creator of Coaching Genie and a business strategist who helps coaches and speakers, she was using too many different tools to work with her clients.

Every consulting or agency team eventually has someone on the bench, no active project, no billable hours. Here's how we treat it as a normal, useful part of the business instead of a crisis.