ENGINEERING NOTES

Production patterns
from real builds.

Written by senior engineers who shipped it. LLM engineering, AI product UX, industry postmortems, founder reads, Canadian tech. No hype, no vendor pitches, no recycled tutorials.

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Founder ReadsApr 28, 2026 · 2 min

Engineering notes from a consultancy that ships

Why we're starting a blog, what we'll write about, and what to expect from this corner of the internet — production patterns from real builds, no hype.

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LLM EngineeringApr 26, 2026 · 8 min

We use 11 LLM providers in production. Here's the routing logic.

A walkthrough of the priority-based registry pattern we run across our AI products — Groq, Cerebras, OpenRouter, Anthropic, OpenAI, Mistral, and five more — with real cost numbers, the failure modes that drove every decision, and the code skeleton you can copy.

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AI ProductApr 22, 2026 · 8 min

How to ship AI features that work without the AI

The on/off toggle pattern we use across our AI products — keeps the platform fully usable when the model is rate-limited, you're out of credits, the user opts out for privacy, or the regulator asks. With code, audit-log shape, and the deterministic fallbacks that actually hold up.

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LLM EngineeringApr 18, 2026 · 8 min

RAG vs fine-tuning — a decision framework with real cost numbers

A senior engineer's framework for the question every founder asks. The four sub-questions you actually need to answer first, the cost reality (RAG at $200/mo vs fine-tunes at $2,000+), the maintenance gradient nobody talks about, and the 90% case where the answer is just "neither — start with a system prompt."

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Industry VerticalApr 15, 2026 · 7 min

AI for automotive aftermarket — an engineering postmortem

An anonymized walkthrough of an AI diagnostic assistant we shipped to drivers and garages — the two-user problem, the technician-review loop that keeps the model accurate as the world shifts, the retrieval layer that makes "frontier LLM with domain knowledge" actually work, and the parts where we got it wrong.

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Industry VerticalApr 12, 2026 · 7 min

Cutting fintech KYC from 12 minutes to 3 — an engineering walkthrough

An anonymized walkthrough of how we collapsed a loan application's onboarding flow from 12 minutes to under 3, dropped the abandonment cliff from 50% to 18%, and didn't compromise a single compliance requirement to do it. The four cuts, the camera ergonomics, and the reviewer copilot that came after.

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Industry VerticalApr 8, 2026 · 7 min

What real-estate agents actually want from a CRM (and what we shipped)

We shadowed eight agents for a week before writing a line of code. What we found broke every assumption we walked in with — and led us to delete more than half the fields in the standard CRM, ship search-first instead of form-first, and skip AI entirely in v1. Twelve weeks to launch, and agents preferring it to the tool they were already paying for.

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Industry VerticalApr 4, 2026 · 8 min

Two-sided marketplaces — matching in minutes, not hours

An anonymized walkthrough of a freight marketplace we built that matches same-day shipments to capacity in under 7 minutes — down from a phone-and-spreadsheet baseline of 90+. The three opinionated decisions that made it work, the asymmetric problem nobody talks about, and the parts where we got the supply-side wrong.

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Industry VerticalApr 1, 2026 · 8 min

From spreadsheets to audit-ready — digitizing fleet compliance ops

An anonymized walkthrough of a fleet safety platform we built — 19 modules across drivers, vehicles, maintenance, training, drug testing, incidents, claims, and certifications. The compliance trap nobody warns you about, the audit-readiness pattern, and why operator dashboards almost always go unused unless you build them right.

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Industry VerticalMar 29, 2026 · 8 min

AI career platforms — the multi-source dedup problem nobody talks about

An anonymized walkthrough of an AI job-application platform we shipped — the deduplication problem that ate three weeks of engineering, the persistent rejection memory pattern, the resume-lens architecture for one user with multiple personas, and why URL-based dedup is a trap that looks like a solution.

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Founder ReadsMar 25, 2026 · 8 min

We've scoped 50+ founder briefs this year — here's what every brief got wrong

Seven patterns that show up in nearly every brief we read. Confusing the product idea with the build scope. Asking for AI before knowing where the value is. Specifying the solution instead of the problem. The fix for each, and what a brief that doesn't waste your $50K looks like.

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Founder ReadsMar 22, 2026 · 7 min

The 90-day build roadmap — anatomy of a $50K MVP plan

A real anonymized walkthrough of a 90-day roadmap we delivered to a founder — milestones, scope per phase, tech-stack rationale, effort estimates, risk register, and the honest "what's NOT in v1" list. The exact document you should expect from a serious senior team before writing a cheque.

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Production patternsfrom real builds.

Engineering notes from a consultancy that ships

We use 11 LLM providers in production. Here's the routing logic.

How to ship AI features that work without the AI

RAG vs fine-tuning — a decision framework with real cost numbers

AI for automotive aftermarket — an engineering postmortem

Cutting fintech KYC from 12 minutes to 3 — an engineering walkthrough

What real-estate agents actually want from a CRM (and what we shipped)

Two-sided marketplaces — matching in minutes, not hours

From spreadsheets to audit-ready — digitizing fleet compliance ops

AI career platforms — the multi-source dedup problem nobody talks about

We've scoped 50+ founder briefs this year — here's what every brief got wrong

The 90-day build roadmap — anatomy of a $50K MVP plan

Get new posts in your inbox.

Production patterns
from real builds.