The Method
How we work
Eight short essays on the operating policy of a senior .NET agency working with AI agents. Each one is a rule we enforce. Each one is a rule we have changed our mind about at least once.
- 01
Specs before code
Every non-trivial change begins with a written spec — the constraints, the failure modes, the acceptance criteria. Code follows the spec, not the other way around.
- 02
No story points
We do not estimate in story points, T-shirt sizes, or Fibonacci. Estimates are wall-clock days, given by the engineer who will do the work, after the spec is written.
- 03
Two-week cycles
Sprint-based engagements run on hard two-week cycles. Day 1 plans, Day 14 ships, Day 15 the client decides whether to continue. No fuzzy quarters, no rolling roadmaps.
- 04
CLAUDE.md per project
Every repo we touch ships with a CLAUDE.md at its root. It is the contract between the codebase and the agents that work on it — conventions, boundaries, what to never do.
- 05
PR descriptions over standups
We do not run daily standups. The pull request is the standup — what changed, why, what risk, what to test. The team reads PRs in their own time.
- 06
The AI policy
Agents draft. Humans rewrite. No AI-written code or content ships without a senior engineer rewriting at least 30% of the words. No AI-generated hero images, ever.
- 07
The hiring bar
Eight years of production .NET, one open-source contribution we can read, one written sample of technical writing. We hire slowly. We do not hire juniors.
- 08
The $80 paid first call
Discovery calls are eighty dollars. The fee is small enough to not matter to a serious buyer and large enough to filter out the rest. We refund it if we are not the right fit.