Wrestling with a software project that no longer ships?

You've tried the expensive consultant. You've tried the two-week training. You've tried the ceremony framework with the certificate. Yet, here you are.

There's a pragmatic path out. It doesn't involve a framework you buy.

Start a conversation. No calendar link. No pitch deck. A conversation.
What's on offer

Training · Consulting · Engineering.

01

Training

Workshops, live-coding, conference talks — delivered on your codebase where it matters.

02

Consulting

Audits, architecture reviews, sparring, decision support — neutral senior voice.

03

Engineering

Hands-on AI pipelines, tooling, DSLs — selective, handed back fully documented.

The pattern

Sound familiar?

  • The ChatGPT wrapper you shipped — nobody uses it. Management still wants AI in the product by Q3, and nobody has said what problem it solves.
  • Your developers are good. They just don't have ten hours a week to keep up with vector databases, agent frameworks, or whatever the conference called important this year.
  • You added tests. You added coverage. You added analyzers. The project is still broken.
  • You're agile, on paper. The ceremonies happen. The velocity gets reported. Nothing about the work feels like the Agile Manifesto described.
The reframe

The Pragmatic Path.

A dying software project doesn't need more metrics stapled to it. It needs someone to ask the only question that matters: does this change produce value now, or over time? If neither — cut it.

The pragmatic path is not a framework you buy. It's engineering judgement, applied to your codebase, with your team, until they can defend the decisions themselves. Then the outside help leaves. The judgement stays.

Where it tends to hurt

Six ways this shows up.

01The 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.

02The 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 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.

03The 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.

04The Two-Week Shine

"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.

05Metrics 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.

06The Scrum-Industry Inversion

"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.

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

Martin Fowler, Agile Manifesto signatory, 2018 — martinfowler.com

"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 — ronjeffries.com

"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 — pragdave.me

"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 — toolshed.com
Engagement shapes

How we work together.

Five shapes an engagement can take. Each one is an outcome, not a deliverable. Equal weight, no ranking — pick the one that fits the situation.

01

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.

02

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.

03

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.

04

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.

05

Hands-on Engineering (selective)

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.

For the curious

If you're curious who's behind this page.

Outside client work, I build. Three places to look if you want to see how I think when nobody's paying me to deliver slides.

  • PXL Clock Maker project · Hardware + firmware

    PXL Clock is a 24×24 programmable LED display I co-founded with Sefa — engineered end-to-end by two people, shipping in limited batches from Frankfurt.

    Real hardware, real firmware, real customers. It's where my engineering taste stops being theory and starts having to be correct at 24 frames per second. pxlclock.com

  • TypeFighter Research language · Type inference

    I build my own programming language with modern type inference. Records match by shape, not by declared name. The solver is written from scratch and documented end-to-end.

    Research-grade, but the notes are readable. If you want to know what I consider "senior judgement", this is the longest unbroken train of it on the internet. github.com/SchlenkR/TypeFighter

  • @ThePureState on YouTube Channel · Long-form arguments

    @ThePureState is my YouTube channel for the longer arguments — language design, functional programming, AI workflows, the craft that underlies the consulting. Two videos beat an hour of reading. youtube.com/@ThePureState

    A good place to start:

    • How To Make a Programming Language — type inference + solver from scratch (this is the TypeFighter deep-dive).
    • Monads in the Wilderness — demystifying monads through everyday recognition. BobKonf 2024.
    • This is My Result Type — three-line F# discriminated unions vs. 35-line explanations.
Proof

Things I've shipped and taught — because I'd rather show than claim.

  • 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
  • TheBlunt A minimal parser-combinator library for F# — used internally in TypeFighter. SchlenkR/TheBlunt
  • Trulla Type-safe templates for F# — strict compile-time guarantees over template placeholders. SchlenkR/Trulla
  • BobKonf 2024 Computation Expressions in F# — full tutorial track. bobkonf.de
  • @ThePureState on YouTube Long-form videos on language design, functional programming, AI workflows. youtube.com/@ThePureState
  • F# Weekly Recurring features by Sergey Tihon, Microsoft MVP.
  • Amplifying F# Co-host of the community format with G-Research OSS.
Objection handling

The questions that tend to come up.

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.

About

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.

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

Let's talk through your situation.

One email. A short call. No calendar games, no pitch deck. If it's a fit, we'll scope it. If it isn't, you'll know that within twenty minutes.

hello@schlenkr.dev