Steppe Integrations
Est. 2024 · Independent
I help small teams land the AI work they have already started — get it running in production, hand it to the people who will own it, and leave.
§ 01 — How I work
Five things, in order. Nothing else.
- 01 Land Take the system that works on a laptop and make it work where your customers are.
- 02 Enable Sit next to the engineers who will keep it running, until they would rather I left.
- 03 Support Hold the pager through the first weeks of real traffic, and write down what breaks.
- 04 Document Leave behind plain prose a new hire can read on a Monday and understand by lunch.
- 05 Leave Finish on the date we agreed, send a final invoice, and stop answering calls.
§ 02 — What fits
The work I take.
Almost everything I do is the unglamorous middle of an AI project — after the demo lands and before the team feels comfortable owning it.
- A model or pipeline that works in a notebook and has never survived a real week of traffic.
- A retrieval system whose answers have started to drift and nobody can say exactly when or why.
- An evaluation harness that everyone agrees should exist and nobody has had the time to build.
- A capable engineering team that has not shipped a machine-learning system before and would rather not learn alone.
- A handoff from a vendor, a contractor, or an employee who is leaving, where the documentation is thin.
What I don’t take
- Greenfield strategy, roadmaps, or decks for the board.
- Building a model from scratch when an existing one would do.
- Work whose success metric is the word “innovative.”
- Engagements longer than three months without a renewal conversation first.
- Anything that requires me to pretend a problem is simpler than it is.
§ 03 — How I work, in practice
Four things I’ve written down, in case they’re useful before we talk.
- threat-trace A working multi-agent log-analysis pipeline with full provenance chains. Three streams under attack, three discrete agents, one cross-stream layer that catches the false-positive trap a single-prompt scanner walks into. Open it in your browser. No install.
- The Mech Suit Methodology From copy-paste to multi-agent orchestration. How AI-paired development actually works in practice — the methodology underneath everything else.
- Find Every Reason to Dismiss Me I commissioned an adversarial AI review of my own code, instructed to find every defensible reason to dismiss it. Why I published the result, unedited.
- The Tight Loop A field test for the Mech Suit Methodology. A 3D replay viewer built in two slices over two days, with the receipts.
§ 04 — Terms
The discipline of a small shop, written down.
- One client at a time. If I am working with you, I am not working with anyone else.
- Fixed fee, paid in thirds: at the start, at the midpoint, and on the day I am done.
- Three months is the longest engagement I will quote without an explicit renewal.
- One written update each week. No standing status meetings, on either side.
- I work from Central Time, mostly mornings, and answer email within a business day.
- I will sign whatever non-disclosure agreement your counsel wants. I do not sign non-competes.
- If the work turns out to be wrong for me, I will tell you in the first two weeks and refund the difference.