How a small studio ships like a large one
Everything here exists to remove waiting. Decisions are made once and encoded, so they do not get re-made in every pull request — and the parts of the job that are genuinely mechanical are done by machines that never get tired at 2am.
What we hold to
These are not values on a wall. Each one shows up as something in the repository: a check, a gate, a document, an account in your name.
Standards are executable
Our coding, styling, security and review standards are not a wiki page nobody reads. They are installed tooling that runs on every change, so the hundredth file looks like the first and quality does not decay as the codebase grows.
AI does the volume, engineers own the judgement
Agents write the boilerplate, the tests, the migrations and the first draft. A senior engineer owns the architecture, reviews every line that reaches main, and is accountable for what ships. That split is why we are fast without being sloppy.
Contract first, always
Schemas, tokens and interfaces are agreed before implementation and enforced by the pipeline. It is what lets four applications be built at once and still fit together on the first try.
Security is not a phase
Deny-by-default authorisation, validated boundaries, dependency triage and secret scanning are part of the definition of done — not a review booked for the week before launch.
We hand over the keys
Infrastructure as code, documented runbooks and accounts in your name. The measure of the work is whether your team can run it without us.
Every project makes the next one faster
What we learn is written back into the tooling, with client specifics stripped out. Your project benefits from the ones before it, and contributes nothing of yours to the ones after.
What the weeks look like
A representative engagement. Scope changes the numbers, not the order — and we tell you which phase we are in, in writing, every week.
Scope
We write the thing down before we build it. A short spec that states the goal, the users, the non-goals and the acceptance criteria — and an estimate you can hold us to, with the risky parts named rather than buried.
- Deliverables
- Spec and acceptance criteria
- Architecture decision records
- Fixed-scope estimate
Contract
The data model and the API surface are agreed and frozen as a checked-in contract, and the design foundations are set in Figma. From this point every client can be built in parallel without waiting on the others.
- Deliverables
- API contract, enforced in CI
- Design tokens and components
- Environments provisioned from code
Build
Vertical slices, shipped to a staging environment continuously. You see the real thing on a real device every few days, not a slide about it. Every merge runs typecheck, lint, tests and security scans.
- Deliverables
- Working builds on your device
- Weekly written update
- Green pipeline as the only route to main
Harden
Before launch the work is deliberately attacked: an adversarial design and engineering review, a threat model, accessibility and performance budgets checked against the real build, and a rehearsed rollback.
- Deliverables
- Threat model and fixes
- Accessibility and performance report
- Rehearsed rollback and runbook
Hand over
You get the keys: repositories, infrastructure, store accounts, documentation and a walkthrough. No lock-in, no dependency on us to change a label or add a page. We stay on if you want us to, not because you have to.
- Deliverables
- All accounts and repositories transferred
- Runbook and architecture docs
- Optional retainer for the next phase
What “finished” means here
A feature is not done when it works on the developer's machine. It is done when every line below is true, and the pipeline is what confirms it.
- 01Typecheck, lint and tests pass; the build is green on a clean checkout
- 02Loading, empty, error and offline states exist and have been seen
- 03Checked at 390, 768 and 1440 px, in light and dark
- 04Keyboard path works end to end; contrast meets WCAG AA; motion respects the system setting
- 05Authorisation is deny-by-default and enforced on the server, not the client
- 06Secrets are out of the repository; dependencies have been triaged
- 07Logs, error reporting and the alert that would catch this failing in production
- 08Documentation updated, and a rollback that has actually been tried
Still reading?
Then you probably have a project
Tell us the shape of it. We will tell you what it takes, what it costs and what we would cut.