method / reverse engineering
Reverse engineering: I take things apart before I let anyone build anything.
Most AI projects fail before they start, because nobody took the process apart and nobody took the vendor's claims apart. Reverse engineering is the opposite of a demo: you start from the real thing — your process, their system — and disassemble it until you can see which parts are load-bearing and which parts are theatre.
Taking your process apart
A process as described in a meeting is a story. A process as reverse-engineered is a list: what comes in, in what format, from whom; what decisions get made and on what information; where exceptions live; what "done" means and who checks it. Two things usually fall out of this exercise. First, the bottleneck is rarely where management thinks it is. Second, a large part of the process turns out to be copying data between systems — work that needs plumbing, not artificial intelligence.
Taking their "AI system" apart
Vendors sell "AI platforms" the way machine dealers sell "fully reconditioned" equipment — the label covers everything from a genuine rebuild to a respray. I disassemble the claim: which parts are a frontier model you could rent directly for cents, which parts are a thin wrapper around someone else's API, which parts are actual engineering you could not rebuild in a week. What remains after the disassembly is usually small — and that remainder is the only thing worth paying for.
Theatre vs. assembly
The test is simple: can this be assembled from existing tools — a rented model, a queue, a database, a scheduler — in days? If yes, it is assembly, and you should pay assembly prices for it. Theatre is when assembly gets sold as invention: custom branding, a dashboard nobody asked for, a "proprietary engine" that is a prompt and a spreadsheet. I have built enough of these systems in my own companies to know the bill of materials by heart.
Where this method is used
- In the process valuation — it is the first three days of work.
- In every build-vs-buy decision on the fractional CAIO retainer.
- In manufacturing and machinery trade, where I apply it to my own business first.