Engineering notes on AI, SaaS platforms and building software that ships.
Written from what we run in production across our own products and our clients'. For the long-form pieces, see Insights.
Real Estate Software's Compliance Tail: Listings, Docs, Trust Funds
Listings and CRMs are the easy 80%; MLS licensing, disclosure retention, fair housing rules and trust accounting are the 20% that gets a platform shut down.
The Day-One Packet That Saves You From Paying for Discovery Twice
A checklist of what a new developer needs on day one so the second engagement doesn't repeat the first one's discovery phase.
Audit Logs That Answer the Question an Auditor Will Actually Ask
Most audit logs are debug trails wearing a compliance costume, and they fall apart the moment someone asks who touched what and why.
What Breaks When Vision Models Read Real-World Documents
Vision models ace clean demo PDFs and then misread the scanned, skewed, hand-annotated documents that actually show up in production.
Hospitality Software Runs on Shifts, Not Transactions
Generic POS and SaaS platforms model the order as the unit of work; restaurants and bars run on the shift, and that mismatch is where the software breaks.
Replacing a Legacy System Without Stopping the Business
A working guide to cutting over from an old platform in slices, not a flag day, so revenue never depends on a single deploy.
Backups Nobody Has Tested Are Not Backups
A restore you have never run is a theory, not a recovery plan, and the gap only shows up during an outage.
Fine-Tune, Retrieve, or Just Write a Better Prompt
Most AI features fail for a reason a paragraph of instructions would have fixed, not a reason that needed a training run.
The Document Review Problem Generic Legal Software Ignores
Legal software fails when it treats documents as files instead of evidence with a chain of custody, a review state, and a privilege claim attached.
Signs Your MVP Quote Is Too Low, and What It Costs Later
A cheap MVP quote rarely means a good deal — it usually means the real cost has been moved to a date after you've already paid.
Edge-First Architecture and the Limits of a Worker
Cloudflare Workers are fast for the right ten percent of your requests and the wrong place for the rest — here's how we draw the line.
Prompt Injection Hides Inside the Documents Your AI Reads
When your AI feature reads customer-uploaded PDFs and invoices, the document itself is an untrusted input channel, not just data.