An agent is only useful once it survives a Tuesday.
I build autonomous agents and the unglamorous parts around them: research that returns real sources, tool calls that fail loudly, approvals before anything irreversible, and a spend cap that holds when something loops. If your team is stuck on something that half works, that is a normal place to start.
The limits I hold myself to
These are limits I put on myself, so the work still holds up six months after handover. They are not a price list for you, and asking for a call costs nothing.
One workflow, described plainly. You will get a straight answer on whether an agent is the right tool for it.
Shipping record
The argument
Not a subscription with a dashboard. A system scoped to your workflow, built in the open, and handed over with the reasoning intact.
Planning loops, typed tools, retries, dead-letter queues, approval gates and a log of every step. Nobody demos this and it is the difference between something you can leave running and something you have to babysit.
Built to lastA hard spend ceiling on every run, the cheapest model that passes the evaluation, and caching where it earns its keep. You see the running cost before launch, not on the invoice afterwards.
Capped in codeCode, prompts, infrastructure and written documentation, handed over at the end. Bring it in house, hand it to your team, or keep me on. Nothing is trapped behind a vendor account.
Full handoverReal workflows, pulled straight from the tools they run in.
Selected work
The unglamorous work is where agents earn their keep: an inbox nobody wanted, a report that ate a week, a wiki that had no search.
Revenue operations
Inbound email gets read, the sender enriched, the CRM updated, and a reply drafted for a human to approve or rewrite.
The inbox went from a queue people avoided to a review screen. Records land in the CRM the same day and nothing sends without a person pressing the button.
Content operations
Four specialised agents brief, draft, check and format long-form research, with sources cited throughout.
A multi-day cycle became a supervised few-hour job. Unverified claims now come back flagged instead of quietly landing in the final draft.
How it goes
No discovery theatre and no two-month silence. Here is the actual shape of a project.
01
Thirty minutes on what your team does by hand each week, what data exists and what would count as a win. If an agent is the wrong answer, I'll say so on the call.
02
You get the plan in writing: what gets built, which tools it touches, where approvals sit, what it costs to run and what it does when things go wrong.
03
Something ends up working in the first week or two. You see progress every Friday instead of waiting for a reveal at the end.
04
Rollout behind a flag on real traffic. We watch cost and quality, fix what the real world breaks, and only then talk about adding more.
Who is behind this
Connected to systems teams already use
I'm Ali, an independent developer, not an agency, and I choose that on purpose: you talk to the person writing the code. Before this I built ordinary software products, which is why the agents I ship have real interfaces, real error handling and documentation someone can follow. The interesting problem is almost never the model. It is the workflow wrapped around it.
Agents in production
Systems connected
Shipping with LLMs
Typical reply time
Tooling
Chosen per project, not per habit. The model layer stays swappable so a price change or a better release never means a rewrite.
Straight answers
I turn a workflow into a working system. That means picking the right model for each step, writing the agent's planning loop, connecting it to your tools and data, deciding where a human has to approve something, then building the screen your team uses and the monitoring that tells us when it drifts.
Asking a chat window is a one-off conversation that you have to drive. An agent runs on its own schedule, decides which steps to take, calls your systems, handles the result and either finishes or asks for help. The valuable part is that it keeps going without you retyping context.
Whichever suit the job. Most often Anthropic or OpenAI models orchestrated with LangGraph or CrewAI, retrieval through pgvector or Pinecone, and integrations over MCP, webhooks or n8n. I deliberately keep the model layer swappable so a price change doesn't force a rewrite.
A single agent tied to one workflow is typically two to four weeks. Multi-agent systems with custom retrieval and an approval interface run four to eight. You see something working in the first week or two, and there is a written scope before anything starts.
Almost always, yes. If a system has an API, a webhook or a dependable export, it can become a tool the agent uses. Recent work has connected CRMs, helpdesks, shared inboxes, spreadsheets, internal databases and Slack.
Typed tools that reject bad input, least-privilege credentials, approval gates on anything irreversible, hard limits on tokens and spend per run, and a log of every step so we can see exactly what happened. Failures are designed for up front rather than discovered later.
Yes, either as a monthly partnership or a defined support window. In practice that means watching real traffic, tuning retrieval and prompts, keeping costs in line and adding capabilities as usage patterns emerge. Full handover with documentation is available if you would rather run it in house.
Yes, and it is one of the most common ways work starts here. I read what exists, run it, and tell you plainly whether it is worth repairing or cheaper to rebuild. You get that answer before any build work begins, so you are not paying to find out.
That is most of the work I take on. Half-built pipelines, prompts that worked last month, an agent that loops or costs more than it saves, a workflow nobody has time to finish. Send over what you have and I will tell you what I would do and what it would take.
I'll tell you. Some problems are better solved with a script, a form or a process change, and I'd rather say that early than bill you for something fragile. The call is free and there's no pitch.
Let's build
Tell me what your team does by hand every week. I'll tell you honestly whether an agent is the right answer, what it would take, and roughly what it costs to run.