$ cat METHOD.md
The 80/20 Hybrid™
A production method, not a prompt
AI builds the 80% that's reusable — auth, billing, observability, CI/CD, scaffolding. Senior humans build the 20% that needs judgment — architecture, trade-offs, App Store review, on-call. It's the only ratio that ships production software in 30 days. Below: the canonical diagram, every blog post, every sales call.
$ right-click → save · or print this page to PDF · the canonical leave-behind
# the-80-percent
80%Automated, reusable, already solved.
These live as pre-built AWS components. Your project doesn't pay for us to reinvent them — you pay for your app.
- Auth (Cognito + federation)
Cognito user pools with optional Shibboleth/OIDC federation. MFA, passwordless, and social login wired from a shared template. SOC 2 baseline policies applied.
- Billing (Recurly / Stripe)
Subscription and one-time billing with webhook idempotency, dunning, and the payment-verification edge cases that bite every project.
- Observability (CloudWatch + Sentry)
Dashboards, alarms, and client-side error capture provisioned from IaC. p95 latency and error-rate panels for every service land on day one.
- CI/CD (GitHub Actions + Xcode Cloud)
Typecheck, lint, test, build, deploy. Phased App Store + Play Store rollouts. Preview environments per PR.
- API scaffolding (Gateway + Lambda + DDB)
REST or GraphQL, OpenAPI/SDL generated, typed clients, request validation, and a well-architected cost baseline.
- Design system (Tailwind + shadcn/ui)
Accessible component primitives, tokens in JSON, dark/light mode, keyboard paths tested. Extends into your brand, not a wholesale replacement.
- Cost guardrails (Budgets + Anomaly)
AWS Budgets wired pre-launch with email + Slack alerts. Anomaly detection configured per-service. You see surprises before your CFO does.
- IaC (CDK + GitHub environments)
Every piece of infra in TypeScript or Terraform, in your GitHub org, in environments you control. You can fire us and keep shipping.
# the-20-percent
20%Senior humans only. No exceptions.
Judgment calls, tradeoffs, audits, incident response. You can't ship production software without them — and AI can't make them alone.
- Architecture decisions
Which parts stay server-side, where to break consistency, what to pre-compute. These are judgment calls; AI can draft them, humans still sign them.
- Trade-off calls under constraint
When the budget or calendar forces "what do we cut?", a senior engineer has to decide. We've encoded our heuristics in a terminal block on every case study.
- App Store + Play Store review
Rejections are rarely technical — they're policy, UX, or privacy framing. A senior iOS/Android engineer knows which flag to change before re-submitting.
- SOC 2 / HIPAA audit prep
Compliance is paperwork, process, and evidence collection. AI can outline; a human walks the auditor through the AWS Organization structure.
- Client strategy sessions
The Lehi kickoff is where trust is set. Senior engineer in the room, whiteboard, no sales partner, no junior PM. AI doesn't sit at that table yet.
- Incident response
When prod is down at 2am, a senior has to read the graph, form a hypothesis, and ship the fix. We're on-call for 30 days post-ship.
# the-failure-modes-we-beat
Two ways to fail. Neither is ours.
The offshore-junior pyramid
Sales partner pitches, a principal scopes, and a junior offshore team quietly builds the wrong thing for three months. Senior review lands when the budget is gone.
Every engineer on your project has shipped production apps at Adobe, eBay, UVU, or the equivalent. The person scoping is the person coding is the person on-call at 2am.
The vibe-coded prototype
Someone drops 40 hours into Cursor, ships a working-ish thing, and discovers three weeks in that it has no auth, no observability, no cost controls, and silently calls an LLM on every page load.
AI accelerates the 80% we already know how to automate — auth, billing, CRUD, observability, CI/CD. For the 20% that needs judgment, the senior writes the code.
$ want the full method?
Book a Lehi strategy session.
We'll walk through your specific product, show you which 80% we've already built, and tell you what 20% needs a senior human. Fixed-price quote by end of week.