Sound familiar?
The deadlines slip. The standups feel like a tax. The latest demo from that AI vendor keeps not quite fitting. And every quarter another decision gets outsourced to someone who won't be there when it breaks.
That's the shape of almost every engagement worth taking.
Six frames · the ones that keep coming up
"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.
"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 10 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.
"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.
"The expensive consultant worked. For two weeks."
You paid. Everyone was inspired. There was a deck. Then the 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.
"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.
"We're agile. Why doesn't it feel like it?"
The Agile Manifesto was 17 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 is 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."
"The Agile Industrial Complex imposing methods on people is an absolute travesty."
How we work together
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Things I've already built and shipped
fsprojects organisation. 499★, 128
dependent packages.
fsprojects/FsHttp
Objections, handled
Why me for this problem
Ronald Schlenker — 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.