Independent analysis · No tools to sell you

AI Coding Workflow Teardown

Independent analysis of how your team actually uses AI coding tools — what's helping, what's creating rework, and where you're wasting money.

A one-week, manual assessment for engineering teams running Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, Codex, and the rest — read by a person, not a dashboard.

·One week ·Worked through by hand ·Async — no meetings ·Vendor-neutral

What this is

Most teams adopt AI coding tools faster than they understand them. Seats get bought, tools start to overlap, review habits quietly change, and no one has a clear read on what's actually paying off.

The teardown is a focused, one-week look at how your team really uses these tools — based on your own PR, review, and workflow history, not vendor benchmarks or generic best practices.

It's deliberately vendor-neutral: nothing here is resold, and no vendor pays for a recommendation — so there's no reason to tell you to keep spending if you shouldn't.

What gets analyzed

Four things, read from your own history.

No surveys, no self-reported guesses — the analysis works from the signals your tools and repos already produce.

Review

Review burden

How much human review AI-assisted changes actually require, and where review time is quietly climbing.

Churn

Rework & churn

Changes that ship and then get reverted or rewritten soon after — and the patterns behind them.

Spend

Overlapping tool spend

Where two or more tools do the same job on the same seats, and what's safe to consolidate.

Flow

Workflow bottlenecks

Where the AI-assisted path adds steps, context-switching, or waiting instead of removing them.

Who this is for

Built for small teams, not enterprises.

A good fit

  • 10–80 engineers
  • SaaS, devtools, or product startups
  • Already running more than one AI coding tool
  • Shipping regularly, with PR review in place
  • Prefer async, written communication over meetings
  • Suspect the tools help but can't see where the cost is going

Not a fit (right now)

  • Enterprises with procurement and security-review cycles
  • Regulated industries (health, finance, government) with data-handling constraints
  • Teams not yet using AI coding tools in earnest
  • Anyone who wants a tool recommendation instead of an honest read

How it works

One week, mostly manual.

01

Send a workflow summary email

A short email: team size, which AI coding tools you're running, and what feels off. A few sentences is enough to tell whether a teardown would be useful. No repo access required for the first assessment.

02

Share exports or screenshots async

If it's worth doing, you send read-only exports or screenshots — PR and review history, tool usage, seat and billing details. Exports and screenshots are enough to begin; no source code leaves your environment unless you choose to share it.

03

Receive the teardown report

A written report (PDF) with specific findings and recommendations, ranked by what's worth acting on first. Optionally a short Loom walkthrough so you can follow the reasoning. Follow-up questions over email.

The kind of thing it finds

Patterns, not vanity metrics.

Illustrative patterns from this kind of work — not numbers from any specific team.

// 01

Two tools, one job, double the bill

An IDE assistant and a separate autocomplete tool both enabled on the same engineers, doing overlapping work. Per-seat billing on both, no single team owning the decision, and no one tracking which one people actually accept suggestions from.

// 02

Faster PRs, slower reviews

AI-assisted changes get opened quickly and tend to be larger. Reviewers spend more time per PR, approvals lag, and overall cycle time gets worse even though "output" looks higher.

// 03

Code that ships, then gets rewritten

Generated code passes review because it looks reasonable, then gets reverted or substantially rewritten within a few weeks. Review is catching style, not the design problems that actually cause the rework.

// 04

A tool used for the wrong job

Something adopted for one task (say, scaffolding) quietly becomes the default for another it's weak at (say, editing critical, well-tested code), where it adds more review load and risk than it saves.

Next step

Start with a short email.

Most teardowns start over email. No meetings required unless you want one. Send your team size, the AI coding tools you're using, and what feels off — a few sentences is enough to tell whether a teardown would help.

Prefer to talk it through first? A short call is fine too — just say so in your email.