Six phases. Every project, every time.

Assess

On site with the team. Watch the work. Decide what is worth building.

We do not start in a workshop. We start at a desk, on a couch, on a job site, watching the actual person do the actual task. Half the projects we kill at this stage. The other half come out with a sharper scope than the client walked in with.

Shape

Write the evals before the agent. Define what right looks like.

We pull 100 to 300 real historical examples and label them. This is the unglamorous week that decides whether the project succeeds. Without an eval set, you do not have a project, you have a vibe.

If you can’t describe success on a spreadsheet, you can’t build for it. Week 2 is the spreadsheet week.

Build

First working pass. Crude but end-to-end.

By the end of week three you have a working agent on a staging URL. It is not polished. It is end-to-end, and we can run it against the evals and see exactly where it fails. That failure list is the build plan for week four.

Harden

Tool calls, retries, cost ceilings, observability.

Most agency projects quietly stop at the “works on a happy path” phase. Week four is the part nobody photographs: rate limits, fallback prompts, partial-failure handling, audit logs, daily cost ceilings, alerting when the model drifts. This is what makes the system survive contact with a real Tuesday afternoon.

Pilot

Live with two or three real people. Measure friction.

We pick two or three actual end users (not managers) and put the system in front of them for a week. We watch what they do, where they go around it, where they distrust it. The thing we ship in week 6 is shaped by what week 5 tells us, not by what looked good on the demo.

Adopt

Handoff, training, 30 days of running support.

We write a runbook your team can actually read. We train a named owner. We sit in your Slack for 30 days, on the house, watching the metrics and patching the small things that surface in real use. Then we get out of the way. The point of the engagement is that you do not need us afterwards.