Engineering judgment
The reasoning
behind the build.
Recurring engineering decisions in SaaS, AI integration and automation, and how I approach them. Decision notes, not client case studies.
Does this actually need AI?
How to decide whether a workflow needs a language model: start from representative inputs and a baseline, then let quality, cost and failure modes decide.
Read the noteWhat belongs in a first SaaS release?
A first SaaS release needs one narrow workflow that solves a real problem, plus the foundations that are costly to retrofit. Keep the rest proportionate.
Read the noteWhat makes automation dependable?
Dependable automation plans for duplicate events, provider outages, retries and inputs that need a person, and makes every failure visible and recoverable.
Read the note