Ronald Schlenker PureState IT Consulting

Vol. I  ·  The Pragmatic Path

Wrestling with a software project that no longer ships?

You have a product that earns its keep. You have a team that used to ship. Something has slowed the room — a mid-size project that drifts, a roadmap that keeps growing, AI that was supposed to land by last quarter. You've tried the expensive consultant. You've tried the two-week training. You've tried the ceremony framework with the certificate on the wall. Coverage dashboards went up. Tests were added. Velocity was measured. Yet, here you are — reading a landing page at eleven at night, wondering what an honest next move would look like.

There is a pragmatic path out. It isn't a framework you buy, a methodology you certify into, or a fresh tranche of offshore developers. It's engineering judgement, applied to your codebase, kept by the team you already have. That's what this page is about.

AI in productionTeam upskillingArchitecture

§ I   Sound familiar?

You've probably heard yourself say one of these.

A short list. Nothing to click on. If two or more of these land, the rest of this page is written for you.

  1. "AI is obviously important. We just don't know how to use it for us."
  2. "Our people are good. They just can't keep up in daily business."
  3. "Fifty cheap developers won't solve this."
  4. "The expensive consultant worked. For two weeks."
  5. "We added tests, coverage, analyzers. The project is still broken."
  6. "We're agile. Why doesn't it feel like it?"

§ II   The Reframe

The Pragmatic Path.

Be honest: you know how a rescue usually goes. A dying software project gets automated tests added. Great-sounding metrics — test coverage, analyzers, unit-test counts — are stapled on. Dashboards turn green. The engine stays dead. If the kid has fallen in the well, you don't throw down more thermometers. You throw down a rope.

The pragmatic path is a way of deciding, not a product to buy. Only do things that produce value — now, or over time. Don't pile feature upon feature. Don't pile ceremony upon ceremony. Don't confuse motion with progress. Every change faces one question: does this earn its keep? If neither now nor later — cut it.

What follows are six shapes the pain tends to take in product organisations right now. Each one names the customer's experience first, then says what would actually help. None of them are hypothetical. All of them are engagements somebody has already paid for.

§ III   Six frames

Six versions of the same stuck.

Each reader-pain block is a scenario a real team has lived through. The bold line at the end is the reframe — what would actually move things.

  1. The AI-Transfer Gap

    "AI is obviously important. We just don't know how to use it for us."

    You've shipped a ChatGPT wrapper nobody uses. Management wants AI in the product by Q3 and hasn't said what problem it solves. The vendor demos keep promising the same three things.

    What's actually missing is the bridge — from "AI is capable" to "AI delivers measurable value in your product, on your codebase, maintained by your team". The bridge is engineering, not a platform.

  2. The Team-at-the-Edge Problem

    "Our people are good. They just can't keep up in daily business."

    Your developers build the product that pays the bills. They don't have ten hours a week to read about vector databases, agent frameworks, or Computation Expressions. So the gap widens: the tools move, the team holds the fort.

    What you need is not a replacement team. You need know-how transfer into the team you already have — so your product carries your team's fingerprints, not a consultant's.

  3. The Body-Shop Trap

    "Fifty cheap developers won't solve this."

    You've seen the offshore model. You've seen the staffing agency. You end up managing more contracts than code. Quality is a lottery. The knowledge leaves with the contract.

    In-house stays. Boost is brought in. Software craftsmanship is not an arbitrage play. Pair-program with senior help for a quarter, keep the result forever.

  4. The Two-Week Shine

    "The expensive consultant worked. For two weeks."

    You paid. Everyone was inspired. There was a deck. Then normal gravity resumed and you were back where you started — minus a budget line.

    A useful engagement ends with something your team owns: an architectural decision they can defend, a tooling chain they can rerun, a piece of code they wrote with help and now maintain alone. Not a certificate. Not slide 42.

  5. Metrics on a Dying Project

    "We added tests, coverage, analyzers. The project is still broken."

    Automated tests on a cold project don't revive it. Coverage dashboards are a green light on a dead engine. Unit tests around broken architecture preserve the breakage.

    When a project has fallen in the well, ropes from above are the answer — not more metrics. The pragmatic question is always the same: does this change produce value now, or over time? If neither — cut it.

  6. The Scrum-Industry Inversion

    "We're agile. Why doesn't it feel like it?"

    The Agile Manifesto was seventeen developers saying one thing: trust motivated people and let understanding emerge from the work. The industry that grew on top of it sells the opposite — rigid ceremonies, certified process police, velocity dashboards, rigid frameworks stamped onto teams that don't fit them.

    Schema-F Scrum is not agile. That's the mistake being repeated for forty years in German engineering teams. Consulting for agility. Not for the Agile Industrial Complex.

    "It breaks my heart to see the ideas we wrote about in the Agile Manifesto used to make developers' lives worse, instead of better."

    Ron Jeffries · Agile Manifesto signatory, 2018

    "The Agile Industrial Complex imposing methods on people is an absolute travesty."

    Martin Fowler · Agile Manifesto signatory, 2018

    "The word 'agile' has been subverted to the point where it is effectively meaningless. Agile is not a noun, it's an adjective, and it must qualify something else."

    Dave Thomas · Agile Manifesto signatory, 2014

    "The word 'agile' has become sloganized; meaningless at best, jingoist at worst. We have large swaths of people doing 'flaccid agile,' a half-hearted attempt at following a few select software development practices, poorly."

    Andy Hunt · Agile Manifesto signatory, 2015

§ IV   How we work together

Five engagement shapes, no ranking.

Each one is an outcome your team keeps — not a deliverable on a slide. Scoped explicitly. No retainer trap.

  1. AI Adoption Review

    A diagnostic engagement for product teams that know AI belongs in the roadmap but aren't sure where. Output: a shortlist of AI moves that fit your product, your stack, your team — with effort and risk estimates you can defend in the next board meeting.

    Diagnostic

  2. In-House Upskilling Sprints

    A short, high-bandwidth engagement that leaves your own developers able to ship the next thing without outside help. Pair-programming, reviews, dedicated spikes around a real problem — not a workshop deck. Delivered on your codebase, with your people.

    Transfer

  3. Architecture Second Opinion

    A neutral, time-boxed read of where your system is heading. You get a written argument — what's working, what's decaying, what moves next — plus a conversation with a senior voice who is neither selling you a replatform nor defending the status quo.

    Audit

  4. Pragmatic Delivery Review

    For teams stuck in ceremony theater. We identify the two or three practices that actually produce value and recommend what to drop — starting from the Agile Manifesto, not the framework textbook.

    Process

  5. Hands-on Engineering

    When the problem is so nested — AI + functional architecture + DSL + developer tooling — that a tool-hire makes sense, I take on the build, pair with your team, and hand it back fully documented.

    Selective

§ V   Proof

Things I've built and shipped.

No invented quotes. No stock-photo logos. I'd rather show than claim — so here are the artefacts, public and dated.

  • Recognized F# Expert — F# Software Foundation, Applied F# 2019. foundation.fsharp.org
  • FsHttp — invited by Don Syme (creator of F#) to the official fsprojects organization. 499★, 128 dependent packages. fsprojects/FsHttp
  • TypeFighter — a research language with structural types and inference-first design. SchlenkR/TypeFighter
  • PXL Clock — a 24×24 programmable LED display shipping via Cumin & Potato GmbH. Real hardware, real firmware, real customers. pxlclock.com
  • BobKonf 2024 — Computation Expressions in F#, full tutorial track. bobkonf.de
  • F# Weekly — recurring features, curated by Sergey Tihon (Microsoft MVP).
  • Amplifying F# — co-host, community format run with G-Research OSS.

§ VI   Objections

Questions worth asking out loud.

Everyone asks these. Better to get the answers on the page than in the first email.

Sounds expensive.
Less than hiring a senior full-time. Scoped explicitly; no retainer trap.
Can you do this remotely?
DACH and remote EU, both supported. Onsite workshop possible for team-facing engagements.
We already have an agency.
An agency builds more capacity. I make your existing team capable. Different job.
We don't use F#.
Good — most of my client work is C#/.NET, TypeScript, and the mix everyone actually has. F# is how I think; it's not a prerequisite.
We only need help for two weeks.
Then you don't need me. I'm interested in engagements that leave something standing after I'm gone.

§ VII   About the author

Why me for this problem.

Ronald Schlenker · Frankfurt

Fifteen years in .NET, creator of FsHttp, TypeFighter, and several other OSS libraries the F# community uses. Recognized F# Expert (F# Foundation, 2019). Co-founder of the PXL Clock — a programmable hardware product that is itself a working example of pragmatic engineering: small team, in-house discipline, shipped without a framework textbook.

The reason this page is written the way it is: every time I see a dying software project, it died the same way — buzzword compliance replacing engineering judgement. The consulting I sell is the opposite of that.

Based in Frankfurt. Work with DACH and remote-EU teams. Trading as PureState IT Consulting.

§ VIII   Get in touch

Let's talk through your situation.

One email. No pitch deck, no Calendly above the fold. Tell me where the project is stuck and what you've already tried. I'll come back with an honest first read.

hello@schlenkr.dev