FirstEngineer

Service

AI features that do a job, not a demo

Most AI projects die because nobody wrote down what the model is actually responsible for. We start there: one job, one measurable output, and a defined answer for what happens when the model is wrong.

Typically 1–4 weeks
AI agents & LLM products
Agents with one job, not a demo

01

Agents with one job, not a demo

Most AI projects stall because nobody wrote down what the model is actually responsible for. We start there: one job, one measurable output, and a defined answer for what happens when it gets that wrong. Deciding this before any code is written is what separates a feature you can put in front of customers from a demo that impresses in a meeting and embarrasses you in production.

  • A grounded assistant or pipeline running on your data
  • Evaluation set so you can prove it works before launch
  • Guardrails, fallbacks, and logging for every call
  • Cost-per-request measured and tuned
Grounded in your own data

02

Grounded in your own data

The agent retrieves from your documents, your site or your database before it answers, and cites exactly what it used. Where there is no source, it says so instead of inventing one. That single rule is the difference between an assistant your customers come to trust and one they catch making things up in the first week — and trust, once lost, does not come back with a prompt tweak.

Proven before it launches

03

Proven before it launches

We build an evaluation set from real cases: the questions people actually ask, including the awkward and ambiguous ones. You see accuracy numbers before customers do, and again after every prompt change or model upgrade. Without that, nobody can tell whether an improvement made things better or quietly made them worse somewhere else.

Costs you can see

04

Costs you can see

Every call is logged with its token count and cost, so you know what the feature costs per request, per customer and per month. We tune retrieval and model choice against that number rather than reaching for the largest model by default. You learn what running it costs during the build, not when the first serious invoice arrives.

How it runs

Same four steps, every project

  1. 01

    Scope

    A call, then a one-page scope: what gets built, what it costs, what date it lands, and what is explicitly not included.

  2. 02

    Build

    The core of the thing first, on your infrastructure from day one. A working demo every Friday, whether the week went well or not.

  3. 03

    Harden

    The parts everyone skips — empty states, errors, retries, analytics, and the case where a user does something strange.

  4. 04

    Ship

    Live, with monitoring and a handover doc. Two weeks of support included, then you take it or we stay on.

Pricing

What this usually costs

The exact number comes out of the scoping call. These are the shapes it takes.

Standard

Monthly · pause or cancel anytime

$2,000per month

One active build at a time, delivered in order. The plan most founders start on — enough to get a product live and keep it moving.

Priority

Monthly · pause or cancel anytime

$3,600per month

Two builds running in parallel and a faster turnaround, for when there is a launch date someone else already committed to.

Embedded

Monthly · 1 month minimum

from $7,500per month

Dedicated capacity that behaves like a team member — in your standups, on your roadmap, accountable for a slice of the product.

Other things we build

Tell us what you need built

Thirty minutes, free, no proposal. You leave with a scope, a number, and a date — or an honest reason why we’re not the right people.