Client Questions
Questions clients ask me about AI and software, each answered on its own page with the evidence behind the answer.
- Can AI Write Our Software Without Shipping Broken Work? Yes, if coding agents work inside a process that catches their mistakes: specification, plan, tests, independent review and human approval. Evidence from WASBuilder.
- Can AI Write Marketing Content That Still Sounds Like Our Brand? It depends on a bank of your own writing and a person who edits every piece. Evidence from GEM, which runs this site's articles, and Ice Cream, built with Brand Heroes.
- Can AI Read Photos and Documents for My Business? Yes: AI can read receipts, labels, forms and product photos and match them to your data, with a check on the results. Evidence from FoodCoach and BuyCAN.
- Can AI Help Us Turn Our Expertise Into Course and Training Material? Yes: AI can draft scripts, rank footage, voice, assemble and publish training videos while a person who knows the subject edits alongside it. Evidence from EduGen.
- Can an AI Assistant on Our Website Answer Visitors and Qualify Leads? Yes: an AI assistant can answer visitors at any hour and collect each conversation, while a person reads the transcripts and decides which are leads. Evidence from the AI Advisor on this site.
- How Do I Tell Which AI Vendors' Claims Are Real? It depends on whether the vendor can show it working on your own data, on one narrow job, with a check on the results. Evidence from FoodCoach, BuyCAN, GEM and EduGen.
- We Tried ChatGPT and Nothing Changed. What Do We Do Now? It depends on building a process around the tool, not the tool: one job, your own material, and a person who checks the results. Evidence from GEM, EduGen and FoodCoach.
- Are We Falling Behind Competitors Who Say They Use AI? It depends on what they have put AI to work on, not on whether they say they use it. Evidence from retail, restaurant and factory-floor writing, FoodCoach, BuyCAN, GEM and EduGen.
- Our Site Keeps Going Down. How Do I Find Out Why? It depends on tracing each outage back to its cause in the process, the technology or ownership. Evidence from the Healthcare.gov rescue and the Software Project Audit.
- Why Do Bugs Our Developers "Fixed" Keep Coming Back? It depends on which of three causes is behind them: side effects, misunderstood changes or plain mistakes. Evidence from Jason Hanley's writing on bugs and the WASBuilder lifecycle.
- We Have Developers but Nobody Owns the Roadmap. Who Should? One senior technical leader who sets direction, keeps the work visible and sees it done, a fractional CTO where a full-time one is not justified. Evidence from Jason Hanley's writing and WASBuilder.
- Our Technical Lead Left and Nothing Has Shipped. What Now? It depends on someone senior taking ownership again and getting a small piece shipped, not on more developers. Evidence from Jason Hanley's writing, his time as CTO at Rumie and WASBuilder.