Custom software for San Francisco — built the AI-native way.
We pair senior engineers with an AI-accelerated delivery model to ship custom software for Bay Area founders and operators — without the fragile output that gives AI a bad name.
AI changed the economics of custom software. We rebuilt our process around it.
San Francisco is the densest concentration of AI, infrastructure, and consumer SaaS engineering on the planet — and the highest-cost, most-picked-over senior engineering market with it. The teams winning here are the ones using AI well: as leverage, not as a replacement for judgment. AI changes the math, but only when senior people own the parts AI gets wrong.
On a Bay Area build, the repetitive 70% — first-draft UI, CRUD, schema scaffolding, glue code, test stubs — is the work AI handles best, fast. The 30% that gets you in production is the part AI gets confidently wrong: agent loops with unbounded context, retry storms that look fine in dev, rate-limit handling that fails at scale, infra patterns copied from hyperscaler talks but wrong for your stage. Teams using AI without senior judgment ship those bugs and find them in the postmortem.
We build for Bay Area founders shipping toward Series A, AI-first companies racing competitors, and post-Series-B teams paying down the tech debt their first sprint left them with. Our model: AI handles scaffolding and the repetitive 70%; a senior engineer owns architecture, security, and signs off on every change. You ship at AI speed without the production scars.
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.
const draft = await ai.generate(spec) // minutes, not daysreview(draft, { security: true, tests: true, architecture: true })// ✗ rejected: unbounded LLM context window on a customer-facing endpoint → chunked + token budget + cost test// ✓ merged: retries with backoff, observability spans on every model call, version-pinned promptsOn a Bay Area AI build, the failure modes are unbounded contexts, runaway costs, retry storms, and prompt drift. Senior review catches them before your AWS bill or your launch does.
What we build for San Francisco companies.
AI applications
Copilots, RAG, search, and agents grounded in your data, with guardrails and evals.
SaaS platforms
Multi-tenant products with auth, billing, and dashboards — MVP to scale.
Fintech & payments platforms
Customer-facing apps, ledgers, and risk pipelines for regulated, data-heavy products.
Modernization
Move legacy systems onto a modern, maintainable stack — incrementally, no big-bang.
Internal tools & copilots
Operations tooling that replaces the spreadsheet-and-tribal-knowledge workflow.
Web apps & portals
Fast, custom applications and customer portals on a modern stack.
A senior team that moves at AI speed.
You work with senior engineers in Pacific Time who own architecture and quality — async review, fast PR turnaround, and the same tech-culture defaults your founding team already has — not a junior pool with raw AI output bolted on.
SF senior hires are top-of-market, equity-heavy, six-to-nine months out, and constantly being recruited by the next OpenAI. An AI-native team gets you shipping this week, ramps up or down monthly, and doesn't compete with your H1B sponsorship budget.
Talk to an engineerTraditional San Francisco dev shop vs. AI-native.
| Traditional Agency | DEV.co (AI-native) | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to working software | Months | Days to weeks |
| Cost | Full senior rates, all hours | Lower — AI removes the rote work |
| Code quality | Good (if senior) | Same bar — every change reviewed |
| AI risk | — | Contained by senior review + tests |
| You own the code | Usually | Always — full repo on day one |
| Scales with you | Slow to staff up | Flex up or down monthly |
Common questions from San Francisco teams.
Do you work with San Francisco companies?
Can you keep up with an AI-first team?
Will you slow our team down?
Is AI-built software production-ready?
Will we own the code?
How fast can we start?
Can you work with our existing team?
Let's build it — San Francisco.
Tell us what you're shipping. We'll give you a senior engineer's read, an honest timeline, a fixed quote, and — if AI-native isn't the right fit for your build — we'll tell you that.