The fractional AI systems lead you hire before you hire one.

I embed with ops-heavy SaaS teams and build the production AI systems your engineers will actually run. A decade at Disney, Apple, and a long list of startups before that. One engagement at a time.

Currently embedded with MixShift.

See how I work →
FIELD NOTES · ISSUE 014

When AI evals replace QA, and when they don't

Three weeks in, the eval harness caught what QA missed: cases users care about that look fine on the surface.

Berkeley, CA06:14
~ timurtek/mixshift on main
$ claude run intake-evals
› 247 conversations parsed
› guardrails: passed
› flagged for review: 9
$
CURRENTLY SHIPPING · APR 2026

Onboarding ops pipeline · 3 of 5 evals shipped

Intake parsing · guardrails · review queue. Two more before the handoff doc.

MixShiftembedded since Jan 2025

Shipped with

Active engagement

Currently embedded with MixShift.

Jan 2025 to present

The AI layer on top of an analytics platform agencies actually use.

Building AI decision-support across MixShift’s Amazon analytics platform: onboarding ops, eval infrastructure, and the operator-grade interfaces that turn the model output into something seller and advertising teams open every day.The case study lands when the engagement wraps.

See the rest of the work
How I work

Three commitments that shape every engagement.

01
Embed

Embedded, not extracted.

Long engagements, inside your team, on your tools. Not a vendor who emails PDFs. I join your Slack, your standups, your codebase, and your on-call rotation if it matters. I stay long enough to make the systems ship, and long enough to hand them off cleanly.

02
Build

Operator-grade interfaces.

Every AI system your team uses has to be operable by humans. A decade of design engineering at Disney, Apple, and a long list of startups before that taught me that information architecture matters as much as model selection. Dashboards, trace viewers, eval tools your team will actually open.

03
Hand off

Ship, then hand off.

Six-month engagements end with your team owning the system. Code, prompts, infrastructure, runbooks. All yours. No lock-in, no retainer-for-life. If the engagement extends, it extends because it's delivering. If it doesn't, you're not stuck.

Thinking

Recent writing.

All essays
AI Workflows

What to build is the job now: AI did not lower the risk of building the wrong thing

Execution got cheap, so building the wrong thing faster is the new failure mode. The job moved upstream, to what to build and for whom, before any code.

5 min readJul 2, 2026
Founder Lessons

AI as the detailer, not the designer: where the on-canvas agent moves your value

Figma's on-canvas agent now details every state for you. That moves the value to your design system and your judgment about what belongs on the screen.

5 min readJun 29, 2026
Founder Lessons

Fix the source, not the symptom: design systems are AI prompt libraries

Most UI bugs are design system bugs in disguise. The same source-of-truth discipline applies to prompts living in twelve agents. Fix the layer, not the leaf.

6 min readJun 1, 2026

Newsletter · Tuesday mornings

The Production Layer.

Weekly field notes from an AI-native operator. I design, develop, market, and shape product direction with Claude as a daily collaborator. One letter, no hype.

  • How a one-person stack actually decides what to build
  • Operator-grade patterns across the full product surface
  • Honest field notes: what shipped, what broke, what I'd do differently
Browse past issues

Launching soon

Field notes from a rebuild: what I learned redesigning my own site with Claude in the loop.

~9 min read · No more than once a week

Unsub any time · No tracking · No share-this-with-your-team CTAs