Notes from production.
What our teams learn shipping AI and product systems that have to survive contact with real users, real data and real audits. No thought leadership — field notes.
Your RAG demo works. Here’s the six months between that and production.
The gap between an impressive retrieval demo and a production system is six kinds of work — and most of them are not model work at all.
From two engineers to twenty: scaling a startup org with a hybrid team
How Series A–C teams scale with a small in-house core plus a dedicated team — one culture, owned surfaces, and cheap insourcing later.
Aug 2026
The first 90 days with a dedicated team: a playbook
A month-by-month playbook for the first 90 days with a dedicated team — what should happen, what to observe, and what to ask if you can't.
Jul 2026
Why Nepal — not India, not Eastern Europe, not Latin America
Nepal is missing from every outsourcing list. What that omission means for seniority and retention — and the trade-offs we concede honestly.
Jul 2026
12 red flags to catch before you sign with an offshore team
Twelve pre-signature warning signs — pitch-team swaps, blended rates, vendor-held repos, exit penalties — and why they are incentive problems.
Jul 2026
IP protection when outsourcing development: repos, contracts and jurisdictions
Structure beats clauses: why your repos and your cloud protect IP better than contract language — plus what the contract still has to do.
Jul 2026
Time zones as a feature: follow-the-sun development for US teams
Kathmandu's workday fits inside a US night. Hand off at your evening, review merged work before standup — if the delivery system is built for it.
Jul 2026
Nearshore Latin America vs offshore Asia: the honest trade-offs for US teams
Timezone overlap is real — and it is one dimension of six. Async maturity, retention, cost and review discipline, weighed honestly for US buyers.
Jun 2026
Will AI replace outsourced developers? What actually changes about team economics
AI compresses the mechanical middle of software work. It does not compress judgement — and that changes who wins in outsourcing.
Jun 2026
How much does it cost to build an app in 2026? An honest framework
No number survives an unscoped brief. The drivers that actually set app cost, where it hides after launch, and how to get a quote you can trust.
Jun 2026
Hire a dedicated development team: the 2026 buyer’s guide
What a dedicated team actually is, when the model fits, how to vet a vendor, and the contract terms that protect you — with the deep-dives linked.
Jun 2026
OpenStack in 2026: when a private cloud beats the hyperscalers
The honest decision matrix: sovereignty, flat heavy workloads, cost at scale — and the operational commitment OpenStack demands before it beats the default.
Jun 2026
What an exit-ready handover actually contains
ADRs, runbooks, on-call notes, IaC in your accounts — and a rehearsed drill: could your team run this without us? Why handover is in the definition of done.
Jun 2026
Characterisation tests: the seatbelt you put on before touching legacy code
Pin what legacy code actually does — bugs included — before you refactor. How characterisation tests enable safe strangler migrations, and when to delete them.
Jun 2026
Trunk-based delivery with an AI pair: what changed in our review gates
Agentic tooling collapsed the mechanical middle of our changes. The review gates stayed exactly where they were — and that is the point.
May 2026
Strangling a legacy monolith without stopping the roadmap
Two-year rewrites die of their own structure. The strangler pattern — wrap, route, extract — ships value every sprint and keeps every step reversible.
May 2026
Cloud cost is an engineering metric. Treat it like latency.
Cost is a runtime property of your system, like latency. Put budgets in CI, right-size every sprint, and give cost to the team that owns performance.
May 2026
Buy or build? A straight answer on internal copilots
Buy when the workflow is generic and the data is simple; build when permissions, domain data or audit dominate. And the hybrid that usually wins.
May 2026
The pilot graveyard: why enterprise AI pilots die, and the org-chart reasons nobody admits
AI pilots rarely fail on technology. They die from missing owners, missing budget lines, and permissions nobody untangles.
May 2026
Golden datasets before golden demos: building eval suites clients trust
What a golden dataset is, why domain owners must adjudicate it, and how regression evals in CI make AI systems safe to change.
May 2026
Agent autonomy is earned per workflow, not granted per project
Approval gates wherever money, data or risk moves — and an autonomy ladder each workflow climbs on eval evidence, with an audit trail per action.
May 2026
Cheaper than a European agency, without the horror stories: how to evaluate offshore quality
Offshore horror stories come from incentives, not geography. The senior-team signals you can verify before signing anything.
May 2026
The vendor lock-in checklist: ten questions to ask before you sign with any agency
Ten questions that are cheap before you sign and expensive after — repos, cloud, handover, and who holds the prompts and evals.
Apr 2026
Exit-ready by design: why making it cheap to fire us keeps us hired
Your repos, your cloud, handover drills in the definition of done. Why making it cheap to leave keeps clients staying.
Mar 2026
Running one team across Europe and Kathmandu without meetings at midnight
The overlap window mechanics, async-first rituals, and what genuinely must stay synchronous. No midnight meetings required.
Mar 2026
Nepal as an engineering destination: what European buyers get right and wrong
What European buyers get right and wrong about Kathmandu — and what to check in any engineering partner, regardless of country.
Mar 2026
What actually goes into the cost of a dedicated development team
Not a rate card — the cost structure: what a team fee covers, why blended rates mislead, and what to ask about any quote.
Mar 2026
Why we let clients interview our tech leads before signing
Rate cards hide the people. Here is what to ask a tech lead before you sign — and why we insist that you do.
Mar 2026
Dedicated team, staff augmentation or project outsourcing: which one fits your problem
The three models defined honestly — including when a dedicated team is the wrong choice — and the decision factors that actually matter.
Feb 2026
Decoding a Hazesoft internship: FAQs and how to stand out
Everything applicants ask about internships at our Kathmandu studio — and exactly what we read for in a spontaneous application.
Feb 2026