AI made the code cheap. It did not make software easy.

What AI changed, and what it did not

A demo that looks finished takes an afternoon now. Software a team can run a business on still takes judgment, testing and time. Most of the cost is in the part you cannot see.

The eight things underneath

Screens are what you see. These are what you are actually paying for, and every one of them came up in our own build.

From our own build

Real things that happened while building Origin’s software. AI wrote the code every time. It caught none of these.

None of these show up in a demo. All of them show up in month two.

Are you ready for custom software?

Tick each one that is true today. Six or more, and a build is worth a serious conversation. Fewer, and the best first step is usually fixing the process, which is often faster and cheaper.

• I can describe the process step by step, and so can the person who does it.
• It happens every week, not every quarter.
• We have tried off-the-shelf tools, and the gap is specific to how we work.
• I know what it costs us today when this goes wrong.
• I know who will own it inside the business once it exists.
• The data it needs lives somewhere we can get to.
• I can say in one sentence what done looks like.
• We will test it on real work before we trust it.

Seven questions to ask anyone who builds it

An agency, a freelancer, or someone on your team with Claude. The answers tell you whether they have done this before.

1. How will you move my existing data in, and how will I know nothing was lost?
2. How do you control who can see what, and how do you test it?
3. What happens when an update breaks something that used to work?
4. How do you test on a phone, with my real records?
5. When it goes down, how fast will I know, and who fixes it?
6. What does it cost to run and maintain each month after launch?
7. Can I change it later without you?

Bring a brief to the first conversation

Paste this into Claude before any first call. The one-page brief it writes saves hours in the meeting, including one with us.

I am thinking about building software for my business to handle: [one sentence].

Interview me one question at a time: who will use it and on what device, how the work happens today step by step, where it breaks, what it costs when it goes wrong, what data it needs, and what done looks like.

Then write a one-page brief: who uses it, what it replaces, the steps it covers, what done looks like, what it must never get wrong, and what is out of scope. Plain language. Do not suggest technology.