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Professional Services

Writing from Sawhorse Engineering on professional services.

Articles: 17
Category: Industry

23 September 2026How to tell whether a task is an AI problemFour questions that separate work worth evaluating with a model from work that belongs in ordinary code.
21 September 2026Retrieval over your own documents: what decides qualityMost retrieval systems fail on chunking, metadata and permissions rather than on the model. What to get right before choosing anything else.
20 September 2026What owning your software actually meansOwnership is four separate things, and a supplier can give you some of them while keeping the ones that matter. Here is the checklist.
18 September 2026Build versus buy: the questions that decide itMost build versus buy debates go wrong by comparing a licence fee to a project cost. The real comparison is different.
16 September 2026Guardrails for AI agents that take real actionsAn agent with tools can change your data. The controls that matter are enforced in code, not requested in a prompt.
15 September 2026Idempotency: the idea that prevents duplicate everythingA lost response can turn a reasonable retry into a duplicate order, email or charge. Idempotency helps, but its boundary must include the actual effect.
14 September 2026The handover package: a checklistWhat a complete software handover contains, and the test that tells you whether it is real.
13 September 2026Automations that stop when the customer repliesThe most damaging automation failure is not a missed send. It is a sequence that keeps chasing someone who already answered.
12 September 2026Private and on device models: when they make senseRunning a model inside your own environment removes a data transfer and adds real cost. What actually forces the decision, and what it changes.
11 September 2026Why your spreadsheet is the most valuable document in the businessThe file one person maintains usually contains rules nobody has written down. Extracting them is the highest value part of a modernization project.
10 September 2026When to use an orchestrator and when to write codeA workflow tool and a service solve the same problems differently. Four criteria that settle which one a specific process needs.
8 September 2026Dead letter queues, and why silence is the worst failureA failed integration needs a visible recovery path. Retry budgets, failed work queues and reconciliation prevent errors from disappearing into logs.
6 September 2026Fixed scope is a feature, not a constraintAgreeing exactly what gets built before building it protects the client more than the supplier. What a written scope actually contains.
3 September 2026Building an API other people will useAn internal API that becomes a partner API exposes every undocumented assumption. What to settle before the first external caller.
31 August 2026Accessibility as an engineering requirementDefine accessibility behaviour while components are designed, then verify it in the complete workflow. Automated checks are only part of that evidence.
27 August 2026Evaluating an AI feature before it shipsWithout a fixed set of real cases, the only available verdict on a prompt change is that it seems better. Here is how to build one that is worth trusting.
21 August 2026What to ask a software supplier before signingTwelve questions that reveal more than a portfolio. The answers tell you what happens when the relationship ends.

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