How I work, and why systems survive me leaving
Anyone can build you something. The real questions come later: what happens when it breaks, does anything move without your yes, and who owns it when I walk away. Here are my answers, each with a receipt you can check.
Three answers hardly anyone puts on their site
What happens when it breaks?
Start with the arithmetic. A model that's right nine times in ten, run over five steps, is right about six times in ten. Each step leaks a little and the leaks multiply. Take out the middle steps and join a straight line to it, and it reads: more steps, more chances to drop one. So in my builds the model only ever makes decisions. Ordinary code does the work and writes down what it did, and a written directive tells both what good looks like. Then I assume it breaks anyway, because everything does. On my own estate a watchdog reads 24 status lines every morning. If the digest itself doesn't arrive, that's the alarm. A post-run verifier checks 11 named failure types, repairs once, then stops and tells a human. It can't thrash. And 24 databases are snapshotted and integrity-checked nightly (5.30 GB to 1.41 GB), with restores actually tested. A backup that's never been restored isn't a backup.
Does anything happen without you pressing yes?
No. Sending, charging, posting and deleting sit behind a human gate in every system I ship. The machine writes the draft and puts it in a queue, and it stays there until a person presses yes. There's no bot on this site either. I don't put AI in front of customers without a person in the loop, and that includes mine. The receipts live on the approval gates page.
Do you own it?
Yes. Accounts in your name, data in your database, code in your repo, docs your team can follow without ringing me. Your team runs it without me: answers show their sources so a person can check them, and it's handed over documented. The receipt is the engagement that ended: 209 source files catalogued in a handover inventory, 12 maintenance scripts each documented with its purpose, and a team running 15 admin pages without me. Go and have a look.
I'm looking for the long ones.
The work I enjoy most is becoming the person a business calls when something needs fixing, automating or thinking through, and staying that person for years. I'd rather earn that than sell a retainer up front, so we start with one scoped piece you can actually judge.
One small piece, fixed price
£750 to £1,500 is typical, quoted before anything starts. Small on purpose, so you can see how I work and whether the thing holds up before anyone commits to more.
The next thing
Usually whatever the first piece uncovered. Same shape: scoped, bounded, fixed. And sometimes the answer is that there is no next thing. I'd rather tell you that than build it.
Your person for this
Ongoing, month to month, no lock-in. That's the relationship I'm actually after, and it gets earned off the back of the small pieces.
The bill, and where the data went
On my own estate, every AI call goes through one door. 22 distinct AI jobs, one router, one file. 14 of those jobs run on models on my own machine, so they cost nothing per call, and private data never leaves a machine you control. The paid provider only gets called when a job genuinely needs it. Your build gets the same pattern, so the bill at month three is a number somebody chose, and you can say where every piece of data went.
Check the estate, then check the numbers
- LIVE The estate, the working systems behind every answer aboveOpen it
- LIVE The claims ledger, every number this site uses, with its method and the date it was measuredOpen it
One more thing. This site fails its own build if a page uses a number the ledger doesn't hold. I don't know what the first piece would be in your business without having a look. That part's a conversation.