I'm Mike Lawson, a software engineer with 10+ years of experience building production systems across a range of industries and company sizes.

For the past few years I've focused on AI integration — connecting LLMs and retrieval systems to real products. That means working with existing models and APIs, not training new ones. The problems I solve are integration problems: data pipelines, access controls, observability, and the delivery structure that determines whether a project ships or stalls.

I started consulting because I kept seeing the same pattern: a team builds something impressive, it works in the demo, and then it quietly fails in production for reasons that weren't hard to anticipate. I like fixing those problems, and I'm good at explaining them to both engineers and the people who fund them.

I work with a small number of clients at a time. That's not a pitch — it's how I make sure the work is actually good.

The hard part of AI systems isn't the model. It's the data, the access controls, the evaluation, and the delivery. Anyone can connect an API. Getting a system to behave reliably, cheaply, and safely at scale is the problem worth solving.

I don't think you need a large agency for this. You need one senior engineer who has done it before, who will tell you when something is a bad idea, and who will still be reachable when something breaks after launch.

That's what I try to be.