Ride shotgun
You build. We co-pilot.
You have the engineering capacity. You have experts who know your workflows. What you don't have is the way to actually run this kind of system: which automation to build first, when to graduate it into something bigger, and which review process catches problems before they ship. Ride shotgun fills that gap without taking the keyboard away from you.
We sit in the room (or the Slack channel) with your team. Two days a week, every week. Code review on every commit. Office hours for the architectural calls. Co-running the review process until it's instinct. Your team builds; we make sure each build is the right shape.
Section I · How we co-pilot
Four modes. Same engagement, four postures.
i · always-on
Code review
Every automation, AI assistant, and test PR gets a review from a Foundry pair. Architectural sanity, test coverage, the same review checklist we use ourselves. Async-friendly. Usually returned within a working day.
ii · 2× wk
Paired building
Two days a week, one of your experts and one of us build something together — a new automation, an AI assistant, an integration. The point is the transfer, not the artifact. By week six your expert is leading.
iii · 1× wk
Office hours
A standing 90-minute slot where anyone on the team can bring an architectural question, an edge case, or a stuck design. Recorded; the recording is part of the team's growing playbook.
iv · monthly
Review co-run
Your monthly quality-control review. We co-run it for the first three cycles — the checklist, the call on what ships, the retrospective. By cycle four you run it; we attend.
Section II · In practice
A logistics operator. Their dispatch team.
Their data engineering team had been trying to build an AI assistant for dispatch optimization for six months on their own. They were stuck on testing: they couldn't tell if the assistant was getting better or worse from one week to the next. We rode shotgun for ten weeks.
10 weeks · 4 paired experts · 6 automations shipped to prod · 1 AI assistant
They did the build. We reviewed every PR, paired on the testing system design, co-ran the first two quality reviews. End of week ten, the engineering lead shipped three new automations without us in the room. Foundry left. The system kept running.
Section III · When to choose Ride shotgun
You have the build. You need the shape.
- Your team can write automation in their sleep, but the question of which one to build, when to grow it into something bigger, and how to control quality is unsettled.
- You want knowledge transfer faster and cheaper than a Build engagement provides, and you have the time to do the work yourselves.
- You've started building and gotten stuck on the parts that aren't obvious from a tutorial: testing, quality control, and stitching multiple AI assistants together.
Some clients graduate to Build for a higher-leverage workflow once the rhythm clicks, or run a Teach intensive on a parallel team.