From our SaaS audits
What we find inside SaaS companies
Patterns from the technical due diligences we run for investors and boards.
AI
A back-end engineer can do what now?
A back-end engineer set out to redesign a React app with an AI agent and came out actually knowing React. The unlock wasn't the prompting, it was understanding the code well enough to steer it. As the cost of entry collapses, knowing the technology matters more, not less.
Ask Claude what you're not tracking
Analytics only shows the events you remembered to add, never the ones you forgot. Let Claude instrument features as it builds them, then run a skill that audits your tracking against your own docs and live data, flagging what's missing, noisy, or quietly broken.
The integration loop
Integrating a tool with Claude rarely needs an MCP server. A boring script wrapped as a named, version-controlled skill does the job, and the real value shows up when two skills combine: one tool tells you what happened, another tells you why.
The strangest hobby at the table
Writing code by hand used to be the job. Soon it will be a hobby, like woodworking or growing your own veg. What a company pays for now is judgment: knowing what to build, catching the answer that looks right and isn't, deciding when it's good enough to ship.
Your company needs more than an LLM subscription
Handing everyone an LLM subscription gives them a model. A shared, self-hosted agent gives them a configured environment with company context, connected tools, and clear boundaries. Why a company should own that layer rather than rent it, and how to start small.
Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth
Coding agents made implementation cheap, but validation never got cheaper. That shift moves the bottleneck from writing code to deciding what is worth building, and the response is more autonomy and faster iteration, not more detailed upfront plans.
The executable code style guide
A written style guide is a museum piece nobody enforces. An LLM changes that: it reads rules in plain prose and applies them on every pull request, reaching judgment calls no linter could express. The style guide stops being a document and becomes a runtime.
My email agent invented a prompt injection, then fell for it
An autonomous email agent hit a missing script, spiralled through 25 pointless shell calls, then fabricated email content including a prompt injection, and acted on it. The fix is not more warnings. It is structural validation before the model ever sees the data.
This tool is useless
Hand two developers the same tool and you get opposite verdicts. 'Useless' is rarely a fact about the thing. It's a fact about the person holding it. The rare skill was never operating the tool. It's imagining the door a tool opens before the use is obvious.
Documentation has a new reader and why it should belong inside the codebase
AI is now a reader of your documentation. When context lives outside the repository, gaps appear and assumptions creep in. Moving documentation closer to the code makes the system easier to reason about, for people and for machines.
Claude up front, Codex in the back
Using Claude Code as the orchestrator and Codex as the engine gives you the best of both tools: Claude's UI, Codex's depth, and minimal Claude token spend. The economics only work when the task is big enough to justify two layers.
From syntax tinkering to systems thinking
The bottleneck in software engineering has shifted from typing to understanding. As AI handles implementation, engineers who thrive will be those who recognise patterns, curate guardrails, and connect technical decisions to business outcomes.
Building a slide deck with pencil.dev and Claude Design
A head-to-head of pencil.dev vs Claude Design on the same markdown input. Claude Design produced the more polished deck and handled speaker notes; pencil.dev still wins for iterative UI work where direct manipulation matters.
Courage as a service
AI is making the knowledge side of consulting cheaper by the day. Teams still avoid the legacy system. The gap is not expertise. It is the structural courage to act on what everyone already knows.
Stop letting documentation rot
Five types of documentation, five different AI leverage stories. The question isn’t whether to involve AI in your docs; it’s where each type belongs and how much maintenance you can hand off.