One architect · Six agent roles · Run from CET
A software company with one human in it.
I do the architecture. A fleet of agents does the build. Production software for about what one good engineer costs you, and a codebase your own AI tools can extend.
Five systems in production across five industries. Three of them for clients, in Germany, Israel and the UK.
First call
Three industries. The same conversation.
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Fifteen researchers, and what any one of them knows sits in a document none of the others have read.
A research institute. Israel.
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Our assistants choose meeting times by hand, and they’re the only people who know why.
An executive support firm. UK.
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A contractor built it. It works most days. When it doesn’t, nobody can tell us what broke.
A real-estate firm. Germany.
The first of those, twenty minutes later
- Buildable
Their papers and internal documents as one graph, on the Postgres they already pay for.
- First
The parser, because a bad extraction poisons everything above it.
- Hardest
Getting fifteen specialists to agree when two things are the same thing.
- Refused
A chat interface, until retrieval was worth talking to.
That’s the whole call. If I can’t play your problem back to you in your own words, I’ll say so and we’ll stop there. The five steps after it are written down.
Fit
Who this is for
You can describe the business.
Your budget is around $20k a month.
Nobody you’ve found can build the thing.
Mostly that means founders whose product outgrew how it was built, and small expert firms still doing valuable work by hand.
And who it isn’t for
You already have a detailed spec and want hands to type it.
You want a phased plan a committee signs off before anything is built.
You want someone to manage developers you’ve already hired.
You need the laptops, the email and the printers kept running. That’s a different job, and the IT supplier you already trust should keep it.
The first two are not preferences. The method scopes by building, so a fixed spec or a sign-off gate removes the thing that makes the price possible.
Money
What one engineer costs
Around $20k a month, cancellable, company to company.
Load a good senior engineer properly — salary, employer costs, recruiting fee, equipment, the manager’s time — and that is roughly what one of them costs you. So the price isn’t the interesting part. What the money buys is: a hire gives you one person’s throughput, and this gives you one person’s judgement with a fleet’s throughput behind it.
| Option | Freelancer | Agency | One senior hire | Here |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $5k, once | Two to three times this | About the same, fully loaded | ~$20k a month, cancellable |
| Starts | This week | After the discovery phase | Month three or four | Next week |
| You get | A prototype | Production software, their timeline | The capability in-house, permanently | Production software and its architecture |
| Changes | It breaks, nobody knows why | New quote | Theirs, while they stay | You make them |
The honest concession is that a hire leaves the capability inside your company and this doesn’t. The full comparison adds how each one gets scoped and what the throughput actually is, with the terms underneath it.
If you’re the engineer this got forwarded to, start at the bus factor instead.
Running now
Those numbers are SignalsAPI’s, which I own and run. Client systems run in the clients’ own accounts, so their figures are theirs to publish. Each system, at length.
Work
What I’ve built
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Ush Executive scheduling · UK
Meeting scheduling for executive assistants. Ranked slots with reasons, on weights you tune.
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KIMA Real estate · Germany
Deal management for German real-estate firms. Arrived vibe-coded on a spreadsheet, rebuilt on a queue.
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A research platform Science · Israel
Papers and internal documents as a knowledge graph, for fifteen PhDs and no engineering function.
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SignalsAPI Recruitment · Mine
457 sources, a million pages a day, thirty-odd services, no DevOps team.
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Virtual BDR Sales · Mine
LinkedIn and email outreach under one orchestrator.
They can hand the codebase to Claude now and add features without breaking anything.
Ush is written up in full — problem, architecture, and the part where the spec turned out to be wrong.
Refused
What I refused
- A vector database for a corpus that fit in Postgres.pgvector did it, and the money went on parsing instead.
- Bulk outreach over a shared consumer channel.One flagged number takes it down for every firm on it, so it went out staged, per firm.
- A second CRM integration in month one.The first write path was two weeks old.
Write
Write to me
Describe the thing you want to exist. Not a proposal, not a deck. You’ll get a call where I say how it’s buildable, what’s hard, what I’d build first and what I’d refuse. Free. It’s one person reading these.
- The repository and the cloud accounts are in your company’s name from day one. Not handed over at the end. Yours while the work happens, so leaving costs you nothing you have to ask for.
- At thirty days you compare what shipped against the acceptance criteria written at the start. The second month starts only if you want it to. A month’s notice, company to company, no minimum and no setup fee.
That is the short first bet, and it is the answer to hiring a supplier you have no references for. The rest of the terms are written down.
That did not send. One click sends the same text by email instead.
No mail app? Write to . What you typed is still in the form above, so pressing Send it again sends it again.
That’s arrived. One person reads these, so the reply comes from the person who would do the work — usually within a working day.
If you want the call sooner than the reply, the calendar is here.
