Field notes

The build log.

Stories from building Helmies. Not a content marketing pipeline — closer to a working journal.

Engineering·2026-05-13·8 min

We shipped a SaaS from a single-tenant tool. Here's the diff.

When Helmies opened up to other tenants, we had to choose between rewrites and surgery. We chose surgery, kept Tenant 0 alive, and shipped in 6 weeks.

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Product·2026-05-06·6 min

Three autonomy modes and the trust ladder

Why we ship Assistive, Supervised, Autonomous as separate modes — and the trust ladder we've seen with the first 40 tenants.

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Security·2026-04-19·12 min

Row-level security on every table (and the bugs we caught)

Default-deny RLS, tenant_id as a first-class column, and the four migrations that caught more than a paid audit.

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Pricing·2026-04-05·5 min

Inventing the helmies-token

Why no SMB owner should have to track six model pricings. One normalised compute unit, with margin you can see.

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AI·2026-03-22·7 min

How we make AI sound like you, not like ChatGPT

Banned-words lists, persona weights, target-reader prompts, and a 15-shot example bank per tenant.

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Engineering·2026-03-08·9 min

Tenant 0 is where the bugs are

Dogfooding the multi-tenant build with our own business as tenant zero. The bugs only show up under real load.

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