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Our Thinking

Notes from the build

Practical takes on software development, AI integration, and shipping products that hold up.

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Product 2026-09-20

The Embedded Team Cost Ledger: Ten Years of Retainers, Headcount Curves, and the Months We Billed Zero

What a multi-year embedded engineering engagement actually costs: retainer bands versus time-and-materials, the FTE curve across six years with GlycanAge and four with Plodovi, ramp-downs, paused months, and the handovers to in-house hires.

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Engineering 2026-09-18

The First Two Weeks Inside Someone Else's Codebase: Our Day-by-Day Read Order, Instrumentation, and the 6 Findings That Reset the Quote

A chronological account of the first two weeks auditing an inherited codebase before taking over maintenance: what we read on day one, the questions we ask the outgoing team, the instrumentation we add, and the six findings that change the price.

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AI 2026-09-16

The Feature That Wasn't Worth an LLM: 9 AI Requests We Solved With SQL, a Rules Table, or Search

Nine AI feature requests that came in from live products, the deterministic implementation that replaced each one, and the two cases where the rules table failed and a model was retrofitted six months later.

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Product 2026-09-15

Before Any Code Is Written: The Week-One Package, Cost Lines, and Six Irreversible Decisions on a From-Scratch Mobile Build

What a founder actually receives and pays for in the first month of a from-scratch React Native build: developer account ownership, per-line first-year costs in EUR, our screen-count-to-week estimation method, and the six decisions that cannot be undone after launch.

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Engineering 2026-09-14

The SvelteKit Startup Build Log: Firestore Schema, Auth Model, and the Four Features We Had to Build Ourselves

A concrete build log from production SvelteKit + Firebase applications: the auth pattern in hooks.server.ts, the Firestore collection shape behind CMS pages, form handling with actions and Zod, and the four features SvelteKit ships nothing for.

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Product 2026-09-13

The SaaS Ceiling: 5 Signals That Tell You a Tool Has Stopped Paying for Itself

The diagnostic signals that flip the economics from buying SaaS to building custom software, including the export tax nobody prices in and the workaround labour that never shows up on an invoice.

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