Consulting
The systems here are free. Building one for your team is what we charge for.
Everything on this site is MIT and stays that way. When a job is too specific, too regulated or too tangled to be served by a public system, we build the one your team needs, inside your repos, and hand it over.
In The Trenches LLC. The name is the posture: we work next to your team rather than delivering a deck at the end of it.
What we build
A context system for one job your team does over and over.
The same shape as the free ones: standing rules, whatever skills and knowledge the work actually needs, committed scripts, and tests that fail when a rule is broken. The difference is that it is built around your domain, your sources of truth and your definition of done, and it lives in your repositories.
Good candidates
Work that is high stakes, repeated, and currently held together by one person who knows how it should be done. Regulatory responses. Design systems. Migration playbooks. Anything where the cost of a wrong answer is real.
Poor candidates
One-off work, and anything a public system here already covers. If the free RFI or logo system fits your problem, clone it. We would rather tell you that than take the engagement.
What you end up owning
The repo, outright. No runtime to license, no platform to stay subscribed to, no dependency on us. If the arrangement ends, the system keeps working, because it is files your agent reads.
How it runs
Short, and in the open.
01 A conversation, free
What the job is, how often it happens, and what goes wrong when it goes wrong. This is also where we tell you if a free system already covers it.
02 A written scope
What the system will cover, what it will refuse to do, and what stays a human decision. Fixed, agreed before anything is built, and specific enough to argue with.
03 Built with your team, not for them
Your people run it while it is being built, because a system nobody on the team can extend is a system that rots the week we leave.
04 Handover and tests
The tests are the handover. They are what tells you six months later whether the rules still hold, and they are why the system survives without us.
What we will not do
We will not sell you a system for a job that does not repeat, and we will not build one that only works while we are in the room. We also will not claim a system makes your team faster without measuring it, which is the same standard the rest of this site is held to.
Getting in touch
Start with the problem, not the pitch.
The useful first message is one paragraph: what the job is, how often your team does it, and what it costs when it goes wrong. If a free system on this site already solves it, we will say so and point you at it.
[not wired yet] The enquiry address for In The Trenches LLC is being set up. This page is published so the offer is legible; it would be worse to invent a contact route that does not reach anyone. Until it is live, the issue tracker on the public RFI system repo reaches us.