// process
From day one to your first demo,
no theater.
Three phases. Agents do the mechanical work continuously; a senior engineer owns every decision that matters. You will see your first working demo in a dev environment, often as early as ~2 weeks. We work async and online-first — deliberately light on recurring meetings so we stay heads-down building.
// the augmented sdlc
Agents do the work. Seniors own it.
The compressed version of this lives on the homepage. Here is what actually happens inside each phase — what the agents do, what a senior engineer decides, and what lands in your hands.
Precision discovery
Agents read your systems.
Foundation, before code
the agents
Discovery starts with reading, not a meeting. Our agents ingest your existing codebase, logs, documentation, and support history where they exist, and work from your written requirements and comparable references where they don’t. They map dependencies, surface patterns already in place, and flag the obvious risk areas before a human conversation happens — so that conversation starts from evidence instead of a blank whiteboard. Customer data is synthesized or anonymized before it reaches any LLM, and where agents work against real systems, that happens in isolated environments scoped per engagement, under the access terms defined in your SOW.
the senior engineer
A senior engineer takes the agents’ findings and decides what’s a genuine risk versus noise. They run the actual stakeholder conversations, set the scope boundary, and make the calls that don’t have a mechanical answer — competing priorities, ambiguous constraints, what’s in scope and what’s a phase two. This is where the relationship starts, not where the agents hand off a report and disappear.
what you receive
Written requirements and scope, a risk register with mitigations, and a fixed-price quote agreed up front — no hourly meter, no open-ended estimate that grows as we go. If you want an NDA, we’re glad to sign one: available from day one, never required to start the conversation.
Accelerated engineering
Agents build. Seniors review.
Continuous, not sprint-gated
the agents
Once architecture and scope are agreed, coding agents take the mechanical work — scaffolding, integration code, CRUD, test coverage, first-draft implementation across the stack. They work continuously rather than on a meeting cadence, which is most of where the speed comes from.
the senior engineer
Every pull request gets a human review before it merges, from an engineer with 8–20 years of production experience — not a bot approving a bot. Seniors catch what pattern-matching misses: the wrong abstraction, a race condition, a security gap, scope quietly drifting from what was agreed. They also close the architecture questions the agents surface but can’t decide on their own — the trade-off between shipping faster and taking on debt, whether a shortcut is acceptable now or a real problem in a year. Nothing ships without a senior signing off.
what you receive
Async progress visibility instead of status meetings — you can watch the build take shape in a live dev environment on your own schedule. Automated tests and CI on every commit, code review on every change, and direct access to the engineers doing the work. No PM layer standing between you and the people building it.
Your first working demo
Running in ~2 weeks.
Often ~2 weeks from kickoff
the agents
Agents keep building against the agreed scope — the same continuous pace as engineering, just further along.
the senior engineer
A senior engineer decides when a slice is genuinely demo-ready, not merely compiling: functional correctness checked against the original requirements, and confirmation that what you’re looking at reflects the real architecture rather than a throwaway prototype you’d have to rebuild later.
what you receive
Access to a real, running slice of your product in a live dev environment, often as early as ~2 weeks from kickoff. You can click through it, test it, and give feedback directly, while we stay heads-down building. That’s the async, online-first model in practice: deliberately light on recurring meetings so the time goes into the product instead of the slide deck.
// judgment, not autocomplete
What the agents never decide
Agents are fast at reading, scaffolding, and pattern-matching against everything they have processed before. They are not accountable for the outcome, and they do not carry judgment forward across a relationship the way a person does. Three categories of decision stay with a human, every time, without exception.
Architecture sign-off
Agents can draft a schema, propose a service boundary, or suggest a pattern pulled from everything they’ve read. Whether to commit to it is a different question — the trade-off between moving fast now and paying for it in a year, what technical debt is acceptable and what isn’t. That call belongs to a senior engineer, reviewed and recorded before it becomes the plan. Every architecture decision with a real trade-off attached has a human signature on it.
Security review
Agents can run static analysis and flag the obvious issues. They do not sign off on security. A senior engineer reviews auth boundaries, encryption approach, and what data touches which systems, and is personally accountable if something is wrong — not an automated report nobody reads. Agent access to your systems is itself scoped and limited to what a signed SOW authorizes, decided by a person before any agent touches your environment.
Client-facing commitments
Timelines, fixed-price quotes, scope changes — anything that becomes part of your contract is set and communicated by a person. Agents inform the estimate; they do not make the promise. If you are in a conversation about scope, price, or a deadline, you are talking to someone accountable for delivering it, not a summary an agent generated on their behalf.
That division holds for the life of the engagement: agents move fast on the mechanical work, and a senior engineer is always the one who decided it was right, safe, and worth committing to.
// after the demo
The rest of the engine.
The three phases above get you a working demo. They aren’t the whole engagement. Here’s what happens between a demo you can click through and a product you’d put real traffic on — and what the relationship looks like once it’s live.
Hardening
A working demo proves the architecture holds under real use — it isn’t the finish line. Between a demo and something you’d put real traffic on, coverage widens: broader test suites, load and performance simulation, and a focused pass on the integration points and edge cases specific to your system, not just the ones a generic checklist would catch. Agents help run that expanded test surface; a senior engineer leads the actual security review and decides what’s launch-blocking versus a safe fast-follow — the same human-owned call described above. This is where the code-quality and security standards below get applied against your specific build, not just enforced as a baseline.
Launch
Deployment and cutover are planned and executed by a senior engineer, with rollback posture decided and rehearsed before go-live, not improvised after something breaks. You get a production environment, a defined path back if something goes wrong, and direct attention from the people who built the system through the first week live — not a ticket queue.
Ongoing care
Launch isn’t where the relationship ends. Custom builds include a 30-day warranty covering bug fixes and stabilization. Beyond that, maintenance contracts are available for security updates, performance monitoring, feature work, and SLA-backed support — agreed and quoted the same way everything else is, up front, never a surprise renewal. Support stays on the same async, direct channel as the build itself: you reach engineers who know the system, not a rotating support desk.
// standards
The non-negotiables.
Security
- ›OWASP Top 10 baseline
- ›Encryption in transit + at rest
- ›Regular audits + pen tests
- ›GDPR / CCPA / HIPAA / SOX where applicable
Code quality
- ›Tests on every change
- ›Code review on every PR
- ›Linting + formatting enforced
- ›Clean architecture, SOLID where it earns its keep
CI/CD
- ›Automated build + deploy
- ›Per-env config management
- ›Rollback + blue-green
- ›Infrastructure as code
Observability
- ›APM + tracing
- ›Centralized logs + error tracking
- ›Real-time alerting
- ›Business + ops dashboards
// how you stay in the loop
Communication, async-first.
Async progress
Online-first updates, not slide decks. We stay heads-down building; your first working demo often lands as early as ~2 weeks.
Dev access
Access to a live dev environment with your first working slice, often as early as ~2 weeks. Watch it take shape online, on your own time.
Direct channel
Async question support online — email or your tool of choice, with in-app help coming for account holders. You talk to the engineers building it. No PM layer.