DEV.co
Houston, TX · Custom Software + AI

Custom software for Houston — built the AI-native way.

We pair senior engineers with an AI-accelerated delivery model to ship custom software for Houston's energy, healthcare, and industrial operators — without the fragile output that gives AI a bad name.

Senior-only engineering · AI-accelerated delivery · you own 100% of the code

AI changed the economics of custom software. We rebuilt our process around it.

Houston is the country's largest energy and industrial-tech market — anchored by upstream and midstream operators, oilfield services, the Texas Medical Center, and a fast-growing renewables and logistics scene. Senior hires are six figures, months out, and picked over by majors, mid-cap operators, and the contractors that service them. AI changes the math, but only when senior people own the parts AI gets wrong.

On a Houston energy or industrial build, AI handles the repetitive 70% — schemas, dashboards, scaffolding, glue. The 30% that bites you in production is everything an industrial environment demands and a SaaS-trained AI doesn't know: late-arriving sensor data corrupting state, offline-capable field apps that have to reconcile when they reconnect, PLC and SCADA tag conventions, and the brutal reality that 'eventually consistent' means 'wrong when a crew is at a wellhead.' Raw AI output assumes the cloud is always there.

We build for Houston operators — field-ops apps for upstream and midstream teams, sensor and SCADA pipelines, hospital-system tools across the TMC, logistics and ports platforms, and modernization of decades-old industrial systems. Our model: AI handles scaffolding and the repetitive 70%; a senior engineer owns architecture, security review, and signs off on every change.

Show, don't tell

AI writes the first draft. A senior engineer signs off.

Every change runs through review for security, tests, and architecture before it ships — that review is the product.

delivery.tstypescript
const draft = await ai.generate(spec)          // minutes, not daysreview(draft, { security: true, tests: true, architecture: true })// ✗ rejected: late-arriving sensor event overwrites newer state → event-sourced with version + replay test// ✓ merged: offline-first field-app sync with conflict resolution, audit trail on every state transition
Every change
AI velocity + human judgment
tests + security review built in
you own 100% of the result

On a Houston energy or industrial build, the failure modes are late-arriving data, offline sync conflicts, and silent state corruption. Senior review catches them before a missed valve change or a control-room alarm does.

What we build for Houston companies.

Energy

Energy & operations software

Field-ops apps, sensor pipelines, and asset-management platforms for upstream, midstream, and renewables.

Healthcare

Healthcare & HIPAA-ready apps

Patient-facing portals, clinician tools, and care-coordination platforms built to HIPAA from day one.

Logistics

Supply-chain & ops platforms

Routing, dispatch, inventory, and visibility tools that replace clipboards and spreadsheets.

Modernize

Modernization

Move legacy systems onto a modern, maintainable stack — incrementally, no big-bang.

Product

SaaS platforms

Multi-tenant products with auth, billing, and dashboards — MVP to scale.

AI

AI applications

Copilots, RAG, search, and agents grounded in your data, with guardrails and evals.

Senior, on-shore, AI-accelerated

A senior team that moves at AI speed.

You work with senior engineers in Central Time who understand industrial data — late, noisy, regulated — and own architecture, integration, and quality. Not a junior pool dropping raw AI output on top of your SCADA pipeline.

Houston's senior engineers are split across energy majors, the Med Center, and an active contracting market — six-figure salaries and project cycles tied to capex budgets. An AI-native team gets you shipping inside a week, scales with your project, and doesn't need an office in the Energy Corridor.

Talk to an engineer

Traditional Houston dev shop vs. AI-native.

Traditional AgencyDEV.co (AI-native)
Time to working softwareMonthsDays to weeks
CostFull senior rates, all hoursLower — AI removes the rote work
Code qualityGood (if senior)Same bar — every change reviewed
AI riskContained by senior review + tests
You own the codeUsuallyAlways — full repo on day one
Scales with youSlow to staff upFlex up or down monthly
2–3×
faster than traditional development
1 wk
to a working prototype
100%
code ownership at handoff
30 days
post-launch support included

Common questions from Houston teams.

Do you work with Houston companies?
Yes — we serve Houston, Austin, and Dallas companies with senior, on-shore engineers in Central Time. Most collaboration is remote-first, with on-site available for kickoffs and key milestones.
Do you work with industrial / SCADA and field-ops teams?
Yes. We've built software that pulls from PLCs and SCADA-adjacent systems, plus offline-capable field apps for crews working out of cell range. We design for the realities of industrial data — late-arriving, noisy, and regulated.
Can you build offline-first for field crews?
Yes — offline-first is the only honest design for crews working out of cell range. We architect for last-write-with-vector-clock-and-reconcile, not last-write-wins. Your crew works, queues changes, syncs when they reconnect, and conflicts surface for human review — they don't silently lose work.
Is AI-built software production-ready?
Yes — when a senior engineer reviews every output, adds tests, and hardens it. The horror stories come from shipping raw AI code unsupervised. We don't, and we support what we ship.
Will we own the code?
100%, from day one. We deliver to a repository you control — no proprietary platform, no lock-in.
How fast can we start?
Usually within days. A short scoping call defines the build, the timeline, and a fixed quote.
Can you work with our existing team?
Yes — we augment in-house teams, review their work, and set standards, or run the build end to end. We flex to how you work.

Let's build it — Houston.

Tell us what you're shipping. We'll give you a senior engineer's read, an honest timeline, a fixed quote, and tell you whether AI-native is the right fit for your build.