AI Systems & Engineering

Problem

A one-person company cannot afford to spend hours each week prospecting, and naive LLM outreach is worse than none: it hallucinates criticism of a prospect’s website and burns money re-drafting the same held leads on every run. The system had to be cheap, self-correcting, and safe to send unattended.

AI architecture

• Structured as three layers — Sensors (discovery, analytics, event-enrichment) collect from Brave Search, Google Maps, and GA4; Synthesizers (the weekly strategy optimizer, daily pulse, weekly report) read the history and write a strategy brief; Dispatchers (outreach, content, demo-dispatcher) act on leads.
• A grounding gate sits in front of every send: a Claude Haiku evidence-auditor classifies each draft against the research it was built from, surgically repairs the one offending clause once, and HOLDS the draft rather than sending an unsupported claim — four blocking checks (unsupported-defect, premise-contradiction, diagnostic-subject, unsolicited-criticism).
• The strategy optimizer reads ~90 days of conversion history and uses Bedrock tool-use to emit a fresh strategy brief every Sunday; discovery and outreach read that brief at startup, so scoring multipliers, email experiments, and volume self-adjust to what actually converted.
• Two model tiers keep cost down — Haiku for scoring and validation, Sonnet only for the writing that matters. Concurrency is held by an S3 compare-and-set run-lock (the account is below the Lambda reserved-concurrency floor). Ships via GitHub Actions OIDC to a leadgen/prod branch.

Measured result

The pipeline runs fully unattended Monday–Friday; the founder only touches warm replies. Diagnosing a self-contradicting drafter prompt (it rewarded confident specificity with no gate to the evidence) and replacing the blind regenerate-cascade with a single surgical repair fixed the dominant cause of held drafts. Cutting the monthly Bedrock cap from $100 to $50 (in config), plus a 72-hour re-draft dedup window, roughly halved observed outreach spend.

Problem

The same domain rules (how to route an expense, when a receipt links to a transaction, which calendar an event belongs to) lived in three places at once — the agent’s system prompt, a dozen Claude Code SKILL.md files, and the code — and silently drifted apart. And a conversational agent that calls real tools cannot fit inside an API Gateway’s 30-second response window.

AI architecture

• A doctrine module defines each domain contract exactly once as a structured fragment. renderDoctrine([...]) composes the agent’s system prompt from those fragments at load time; a generator stamps the same fragments into the Claude Code skill docs between markers — so editing one file updates every surface that consumes the rule.
• The agent’s entire tool surface (135 read/write tools) is declared once in a shared tool-registry: read tools auto-execute and feed results back to the model; write tools are surfaced with full schemas but intercepted and staged as reviewable plan-ops that only commit after the human approves.
• Loading all 135 tool schemas every turn would cost ~27K tokens; instead the agent loads only a curated hot set and discovers the long tail on demand via a search_tools meta-tool (ranked over the registry, with a per-conversation activated set) — a ~76% per-turn cut. Anthropic’s native tool-search defer-loading is InvokeModel-only on Bedrock and this agent runs on the Converse API, so it’s a hand-rolled equivalent of their tool-search guidance.
• To beat the 30s gateway cap, /chat/send writes a "thinking" status row and self-invokes the Lambda asynchronously (InvocationType: Event); the real agent loop runs off the request path with a 180s timeout while the UI polls status. Up to 20 model turns per conversation.
• A receipt-to-transaction matcher runs daily: it links a paid receipt to its ledger transaction on an exact-amount, ±7-day, unique match (vendor keyword as tie-breaker), and the link is enqueued by the canonical writer itself — the contract is code-enforced, not documented and hoped for.

Measured result

Domain rules stopped drifting because there is now structurally one copy. The agent runs long, multi-tool reasoning turns without hitting the gateway timeout, and proposes writes that a human approves before they ever touch live records — the assistant operates the system without being trusted to act unsupervised.

Problem

Most website audits grade one dimension (speed, or SEO) and stop. Worse, static accessibility checkers are blind to the real failure modes — they can only compare text against a solid CSS background color, so light text laid over a busy hero image passes a static check and fails a human. Selling a website rebuild needs a defensible, repeatable standard, not a vibe.

AI architecture

• Six weighted pillars (Brand & Design, Message & Persuasion, Technical Foundation, Integrations & Workflow, Maintainability & Ownership, Conversion & Growth) are codified as the single source of truth; seven automated checks (accessibility, SEO, links, content, structured-data, performance, mobile) map onto them and roll up to a 0–100 score and an A–F grade.
• A rendered (real-browser) mode adds what static tools cannot see: it screenshots the page with and without text to measure true text-over-media WCAG contrast, click-tests CTAs to catch buttons that do nothing, renders at a 390px phone width to find overflow and sub-44px tap targets, and measures per-image weight against explicit standards.
• The output that matters is not the letter grade — it is the prioritized list of gaps. The grade is the diagnostic lens; the gap vocabulary is the deliverable.
• Wired into the sales motion: the same engine grades a prospect’s legacy site and the proposed rebuild side by side, so the pitch is a before/after scorecard rather than an opinion.

Measured result

A repeatable, code-enforced website standard that produces a client-facing scorecard on demand — catching the exact text-over-image contrast failures that pass every static checker, and converting an audit into a numbered to-do list a prospect can act on whether or not they ever hire.