Enterprise pilot
The demo cannot explain or recover from a bad answer.
The happy path looks persuasive, while evidence gaps, tool errors, and escalation paths remain undefined.
AI product sprint / one founder-led slot
Your AI demo works. Now make it survive customers.
I ship one customer-blocking AI feature in 10 working days: product flow, API, evals, failure handling, instrumentation, tests, deployment, and handoff.
1 founding-rate sprint remainsacross the build practice, confirmed manually.
In-house example / support copilot
Eval Runner
Release candidatecandidate-ai-07
State 01 / 04
A convincing answer with no release gate
The assistant answers the happy path, but there is no evidence trail when account policy matters.
Trace
- Customer request
- "Can our Growth plan use SSO?"
- Model response
- "Yes, I can help you enable it."
- Evidence attached
- None
Unmeasured risk
A plausible answer can promise an entitlement the customer does not have.
Next change
Turn the failure into a repeatable eval before changing the prompt.
Labeled resultUNVERIFIED
Useful demo, unsafe release
Representative in-house example. It demonstrates the working method, not a client result or benchmark.
AI product development
What is an AI product development sprint?
An AI product development sprint is a fixed-scope engagement that takes one valuable AI capability from a working idea or prototype to a production release. The work is organized around a customer outcome, not a broad model experiment.
In this 10-working-day sprint, that means the product flow, API, evaluation suite, guardrails, failure handling, observability, tests, deployment, and operating handoff needed for one bounded feature.
Review Omid Ahourai's background and public work on GitHub.
- 01
Production RAG or search
Ship grounded answers with citations, evals, fallback behavior, and traces your team can inspect.
- 02
Agent workflow with guardrails
Connect tools and approvals around one customer job, with budgets, retries, and a human escalation path.
- 03
Prototype-to-production hardening
Turn a working demo into a tested product flow with observability, failure states, deployment, and handoff.
The operating promise
One senior builder. One bounded feature. Ten working days.
You work directly with the person scoping, writing, testing, and releasing the feature. The day-5 slice keeps the work inspectable before the production handoff.
ScopeThe feature blocking a customer, pilot, or release
Day 05Vertical slice
Real path, real application data, reviewed together.
Day 10Production handoff
Acceptance evidence, deployment, rollback, and notes.
OwnershipYour code
No lock-in, staffing shuffle, or mystery relay.
Where prototypes get stuck
The model is rarely the whole production problem.
This sprint starts after the demo, when a customer commitment turns ambiguous behavior into an engineering risk.
Customer commitment
There is no measurable release gate.
Prompt tweaks happen by feel because the customer promise is not represented in a repeatable eval suite.
Model or provider change
The system boundary is implicit.
Timeouts, structured outputs, retries, budgets, and fallback behavior are scattered across a prototype path.
Launch deadline
The team cannot see what happened in production.
A failure arrives as a support ticket instead of a trace with the model, evidence, tool calls, and decision path.
Definition of production
A customer path with evidence, failure states, and an owner.
The exact implementation follows your stack. The release bar stays consistent: behavior is testable, observable, reversible, and understandable by the team that inherits it.
01 / Customer path
The complete product flow
The UI and API behavior a real customer uses, including loading, empty, denied, retry, and handoff states.
02 / Release gate
Evals tied to the promise
Executable cases for the agreed acceptance criterion, including adversarial and provider-failure paths that can block release.
03 / Failure design
Guardrails with useful fallbacks
Evidence rules, approvals, retries, limits, and human escalation designed as product behavior instead of catch-all errors.
04 / Operations
Traces a team can act on
Inputs, provider calls, evidence, latency, fallback reasons, and outcome labels that make a production report diagnosable.
05 / Delivery
Tests, deployment, and rollback
The feature ships through your existing stack with regression coverage, release notes, and a known recovery point.
06 / Ownership
Code and context stay with your team
A direct handoff with architecture notes, eval commands, trace guidance, and a 14-day defect warranty. No agency relay.
Production handoff includesCode, tests, eval commands, trace guidance, deployment notes, rollback path, and the accepted release evidence.
The 10-day process
Short enough to stay focused. Long enough to release.
The clock begins only when scope, access, dependencies, and a decision-maker are ready. New scope gets a new written acceptance criterion; customer-caused blockers pause the clock.
Before day 01
Pin the release contract
Agree on one customer path and one written acceptance criterion. Repository, staging, credentials, dependencies, and a decision-maker are ready before the clock begins.
Days 01-02
Trace the current path
Reproduce the blocker, map model and tool boundaries, write the failing eval, and confirm the smallest production slice that proves the flow.
Days 03-05
Ship the vertical slice
Wire the customer flow through real application data and staging. Review a working slice together on day 5 while changes are still inexpensive.
Days 06-08
Harden the exception paths
Add guardrails, provider failure handling, traces, regression cases, and the operational states needed to support the feature after launch.
Days 09-10
Release and transfer ownership
Run the acceptance gate, deploy through your release process, verify rollback, and hand over code, evidence, and operating notes.
Scope boundary
A sharp fit is part of shipping.
The sprint works when the product decision is made and one valuable customer behavior needs senior production engineering.
Good fit
- Founder-led B2B AI company with a live repository and real users or pilots.
- One feature is blocking a customer, enterprise pilot, migration, or committed launch.
- One decision-maker can approve a measurable acceptance criterion.
- Repository, staging, and required provider credentials can be ready on day one.
- The expected business value comfortably exceeds the sprint fee.
Not this sprint
- A greenfield MVP or an entire product built from a blank repository.
- Open-ended model research without a committed customer behavior.
- A broad platform rewrite, data migration, or undefined architecture cleanup.
- A request to invent product strategy while engineering waits for a decision.
- Dependencies, data access, or a responsible decision-maker cannot be available.
Your side: product decision, access, credentials, and timely review. My side: implementation, release evidence, and a candid call when the boundary moves.
Transparent reservation
Reserve the sprint price. Then confirm fit and timing.
One fixed package, with payment milestones and the refund boundary visible before checkout.
Standard rate $25,000
$18,000
Founding rate for the single manually confirmed slot.
$1,800 deposit todayCredited in full toward the displayed sprint price.
The deposit reserves the price, not a start date.
Verified payment unlocks a private fit and start-window call. Two start options are offered within 60 days when the sprint is a fit.
Clear refund boundary.
Refunded if I decline fit, cannot offer two start dates within 60 days, or you cancel before accepting a date. It becomes non-refundable after written SOW and date acceptance.
Balance follows delivery milestones.
Another 40% is due before work begins; the final 50% is due at production handoff. Applicable taxes are disclosed before the SOW.
Deposit terms version 2026-07-18. Secure checkout is handled by Stripe.
Straight answers
Operational FAQ
Scope, payment, access, and ownership before either of us commits.
What counts as one AI feature?
One end-to-end customer behavior with one written acceptance criterion. It can include the UI, API, model or tool path, evals, failure handling, instrumentation, tests, and deployment needed to make that behavior production-ready. A product area, platform migration, or backlog is not one feature.
What must be ready before day one?
A working repository, staging access, required credentials and dependencies, one decision-maker, and a measurable acceptance criterion. The 10-working-day clock starts when those inputs are ready. Customer-caused blockers pause the clock and may move the release date.
Does the $1,800 deposit guarantee a start date?
No. It reserves the displayed $18,000 founding price and unlocks a private fit and start-window call after payment is verified. If the sprint is a fit, I offer two start options within 60 days. The deposit does not by itself promise a date.
When is the deposit refundable?
It is refunded if I decline the fit, cannot offer two start dates within 60 days, or you cancel before accepting a date. Once we accept the written SOW and date, it is non-refundable because that capacity is reserved.
Who chooses the model and owns the code?
Model and architecture choices are made against the agreed behavior, your stack, and operating constraints. Your company owns the production code and receives the tests, evals, release evidence, and handoff notes. There is no proprietary delivery framework to license back.
What happens after day 10?
The sprint ends at production handoff with release evidence and operating notes. A 14-day warranty covers defects against the agreed acceptance criterion. New behavior, changed scope, and third-party changes are scoped separately.
Low-commitment path
Bring the blocker, not a polished brief.
Tell me which customer is waiting, what the feature does today, and what must be true in production. I will reply with a written fit assessment and the next concrete step.
A qualified inquiry receives a written fit response and the same deposit path. Scheduling stays private until payment is verified.
Adjacent sprints
Same operating model, different risk surface.
fintech / 10 working days
Fintech Feature Sprint
Ship one revenue- or compliance-blocking workflow with operations and release evidence.
devtools / 10 working days
Developer Tools Product Sprint
Ship one setup-to-success path with failure recovery, instrumentation, tests, and a working quickstart.
onchain / 10 working days
Agentic Onchain Sprint
Ship one production wallet, payment, contract, or agent feature with explicit safety boundaries.