What I’m Documenting Here
A short orientation to the writing: what it covers, how it’s organized around a phased framework, and where things currently stand.
This is where I write about building the software that runs a small custom manufacturer, while it’s being built, not reconstructed afterward from a safe distance.
Most of what’s written about this kind of software assumes a dedicated team, clean data, and a budget to match. A small manufacturer has none of that. So the work here is about closing that gap with what a small company actually has, and being honest about what holds up and what doesn’t. If that is the spot you are in, a small operation with a big ambition and not much slack, you are who this is written for.
How the writing is organized
The longer pieces fall into four pillars. Read them in order and you move from why this matters to what actually happened:
- The Problem. Why AI tooling built for enterprises doesn’t transfer to small manufacturers, and what the gap costs.
- The Methodology. The Manufacturing Intelligence Framework: two interlocking frameworks, eight phases, and the feedback triangle that ties them together.
- The Implementation. How the systems actually get built. Tools, agent configuration, architecture, and the parts that broke.
- The Results. Quantified before/after outcomes from real deployments.
Shorter, looser thoughts, the things I’m learning or figuring out, live in notes. What I’m actively building lives in projects.
If you’re an engineer or operator trying to figure out where AI realistically fits in a small operation, that’s exactly who I’m writing for. If you only read one thing, make it the framework. Everything else here is a footnote to it. And if you want the why underneath all of it, the larger aim these pieces serve, that has its own page.