AI SYSTEMS ENGINEERING

FAQ #

• What’s the “production AI wall”?

  PoCs work in controlled demos. Production is messier: multi-column PDFs, footnotes, niche vocabulary, 7-step workflows, and failing tool calls. The wall isn’t the model — it’s the engineering around it: agent state management, retrieval architecture, and fine-tuning. We build through it.
• When does RAG fail and how do you fix it?

  RAG usually fails at retrieval, not generation. Naive chunking splits context, cosine similarity returns adjacent but wrong chunks, and single-vector search misses exact matches. We fix it with hybrid retrieval, reranking, document-specific chunking, and retrieval evals before deployment.
• Is n8n / Make.com / Zapier involved in your work?

  Sometimes n8n is the right data pipe: webhooks, calendar triggers, moving records. We use reliable tools there and don’t reinvent them. But n8n isn’t the AI layer — complex agents, RAG, and fine-tuning need state, retrieval, and model engineering, and that’s where we fit.
• Do you work with our existing ML team?

  Yes — and we prefer it. Your ML team is strong on model training and research; we fill the production engineering layer: agent state management, retrieval architecture, inference optimization, and deployment infrastructure. We augment your team, not replace it.
• What if we just need a simple chatbot?

  Off-the-shelf RAG products like Cohere, Vertex AI Search, and OpenAI Assistants handle standard chatbot use cases well. If a managed template fits, we’ll say so in the CTO Consultation. We’re the right fit when you need agent architecture, custom retrieval, or domain fine-tuning.
• We built a PoC that hallucinates — can you fix it?

  Usually, yes. RAG hallucination is an engineering problem with diagnostics: wrong chunks, missing reranker, poor chunk strategy, or model output beyond context. We identify the failing layer and only rebuild if the architecture is fundamentally wrong — clarified in Discovery.
• Do you do AI strategy or just build?

  We build. The $195 CTO Consultation maps your failure mode and scopes the architecture. The $950 Discovery Phase validates the approach and produces the architecture spec. The $4,500 Pilot Phase delivers working code. No strategy workshops, no transformation roadmaps, no AI readiness assessments.
• Do you sign NDAs?

  Yes. We sign NDAs before any technical discussion begins, on request.
• Who owns the code after delivery?

  You do. IP, source code, architecture docs, and deployment runbooks are fully assigned on completion — no vendor lock-in, no proprietary platform dependency.
• Do you work with formal contracts?

  Yes. Signed contracts with fixed scope per phase. You’re contracting with a registered entity, not an individual.