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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.comFive shapes an engagement can take. Each one is an outcome, not a deliverable. Equal weight, no ranking — pick the one that fits the situation.
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.
fsprojects organization. 499★, 128 dependent packages. fsprojects/FsHttp
Less than hiring a senior full-time. Scoped explicitly; no retainer trap.
DACH and remote EU, both supported. Onsite workshop possible for team-facing engagements.
An agency builds more capacity. I make your existing team capable. Different job.
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.
Then you don't need me. I'm interested in engagements that leave something standing after I'm gone.
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.
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