Notes from real engineering work: causes we found, how we proved them, and what we would check first on your site.https://evdevs.com/enhttps://evdevs.com/blog/a-site-that-updates-itself/https://evdevs.com/blog/a-site-that-updates-itself/A new affiliate site publishes fresh data twice a day and new content every morning, with no one at the keyboard. How the automation works, and the one rule that makes it safe to leave alone.Mon, 05 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/astro-on-vercel-in-one-day/https://evdevs.com/blog/astro-on-vercel-in-one-day/We moved evdevs.com from hand-uploaded static files to Astro on Vercel in one day. A parity check proved all 111 URLs matched, email never moved, and the site gained a lead pipeline.Mon, 05 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/decide-success-before-the-test/https://evdevs.com/blog/decide-success-before-the-test/One way of wording a title matches 28,413 searches a month; the other, 24. Before we test which wins, we write down how we will judge it. Why that order matters.Mon, 05 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/every-lead-should-arrive-with-its-source/https://evdevs.com/blog/every-lead-should-arrive-with-its-source/How we made every lead on evdevs.com carry where it came from, what the person needs and when they want to start, so marketing spend and content can be judged by the clients they produce.Mon, 05 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/lead-magnets-that-give-before-they-ask/https://evdevs.com/blog/lead-magnets-that-give-before-they-ask/Our free self-checks give a scored result, the gaps and their fixes on the page, with no email required. Then they offer two ways forward and a report built to be forwarded. Here is how they work.Mon, 05 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/the-pages-nobody-reads/https://evdevs.com/blog/the-pages-nobody-reads/Section pages hold a site together, and they are rarely reviewed. We audited 300 of them: 4,575 findings, 255 rewritten, 81 cut to half their length.Mon, 05 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/check-a-warning-against-a-known-answer/https://evdevs.com/blog/check-a-warning-against-a-known-answer/Pipeline warnings that nobody has checked are just noise with confidence. So before launch we built a test account where we knew every right answer, and the product had to match all 23.Sun, 04 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/put-the-offer-where-the-product-is/https://evdevs.com/blog/put-the-offer-where-the-product-is/A new affiliate site led with the market’s biggest topics, but its partner sold something narrower. We researched the partner in a day and rebuilt the home page the next. Why matching offer and page matters more than traffic.Sun, 04 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/101-releases-in-10-weeks/https://evdevs.com/blog/101-releases-in-10-weeks/Speed and safety are usually traded off. On our current engagement we shipped 101 reviewed releases in 10 weeks on a site that earns every day. How.Sat, 03 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/ai-content-that-does-not-make-things-up/https://evdevs.com/blog/ai-content-that-does-not-make-things-up/430 data-led articles in two weeks, in two languages, with no invented numbers. The trick is not a better prompt: it is a pipeline where the AI writes and the data decides.Sat, 03 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/what-a-prototype-skips/https://evdevs.com/blog/what-a-prototype-skips/A prototype assumes every system answers and every input is clean. Production plans for the day they don’t. What we build into every system so it keeps working, and keeps someone responsible for it.Fri, 02 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/before-you-buy-a-website/https://evdevs.com/blog/before-you-buy-a-website/Traffic screenshots and revenue spreadsheets are where a site sale starts, not where it should end. Six technical questions to answer before money changes hands.Thu, 01 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/redesign-without-losing-rankings/https://evdevs.com/blog/redesign-without-losing-rankings/A redesign is the most common way to lose traffic you already earned. How we rebuilt a site, cut phone load time to 1.9 s, and compared 3,050 pages before anyone saw it.Wed, 30 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/on-google-the-same-day/https://evdevs.com/blog/on-google-the-same-day/An article that went live at 09:18 was seen 547 times in search that day. New pages averaged position 4.8 within 13 days. What made the difference.Tue, 29 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/the-goal-is-not-ai-adoption/https://evdevs.com/blog/the-goal-is-not-ai-adoption/Nobody needs AI; they need recovered revenue, a coached team, a product that ships. How we pick the outcome before the model, and use AI only where it earns its place, with examples from a school platform and a traffic recovery.Mon, 28 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/less-site-more-traffic/https://evdevs.com/blog/less-site-more-traffic/15,587 pages brought one visit between them in 25 days. Why a smaller site can earn more, and how to cut without losing anything you might need back.Sun, 27 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/from-zero-tests-to-943/https://evdevs.com/blog/from-zero-tests-to-943/Sixteen weeks of a product had no automated checks. By its September release it had 918, and a gate that blocks any release when one fails. What we built, and the two times the safety net itself needed fixing.Sat, 26 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/the-cleanup-job-that-deleted-page-one/https://evdevs.com/blog/the-cleanup-job-that-deleted-page-one/An automated clean-up removed articles two days after publishing, including 670 ranking on Google’s first page. How we found it, and the audit we now run on every site.Fri, 25 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/a-successful-request-is-not-a-correct-answer/https://evdevs.com/blog/a-successful-request-is-not-a-correct-answer/An AI call that returns successfully can still be wrong. The checks we build around every model before people act on its output: structured outputs, rules alongside the model, fallbacks, provenance, review and tests.Thu, 24 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/proving-customer-data-stays-apart/https://evdevs.com/blog/proving-customer-data-stays-apart/A product that holds several companies’ sales calls must never let one see another’s. Saying so is easy. Here is how we checked it on the live system, and what we built so the answer stays true after every change.Wed, 23 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/same-customer-five-ids/https://evdevs.com/blog/same-customer-five-ids/Every system has its own idea of a customer, a note or a date. Normalization turns them into one validated shape, and it quietly decides what your AI will say. Lessons from an AI platform for lawyers and clinicians.Tue, 22 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/start-where-the-business-runs/https://evdevs.com/blog/start-where-the-business-runs/The first stage of every project is getting the real data in, from where the business actually operates. Why a sample is not enough, and what a traffic diagnosis and a sales product taught us about it.Mon, 21 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/trusted-systems-not-ai-demos/https://evdevs.com/blog/trusted-systems-not-ai-demos/Ingestion, normalization, trust, value, production. The five stages every project of ours goes through, from a website losing revenue to an AI assistant for clinicians, and why the model comes fourth.Sun, 20 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/thousands-of-lessons-written-by-ai/https://evdevs.com/blog/thousands-of-lessons-written-by-ai/SuperEscuela has 733 topics, 2,786 lessons and 13,705 practice questions, written by an AI pipeline against Costa Rica’s national curriculum. How the pipeline works, and where the AI is kept out on purpose.Sat, 19 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/your-investors-will-check-your-numbers/https://evdevs.com/blog/your-investors-will-check-your-numbers/Traction is the story of the next round, and investors increasingly check it. Two real cases of numbers that looked fine and were not, and the checks that would have caught them before a board deck did.Fri, 18 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/forward-deployed-engineering/https://evdevs.com/blog/forward-deployed-engineering/Forward-deployed engineers work directly with your leadership, people, workflows and data, from strategy to production, instead of building from a spec at a distance. What it changes, what you need to provide, and how it differs from staff augmentation and report-only consulting.Thu, 17 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/write-the-rulebook-first/https://evdevs.com/blog/write-the-rulebook-first/Before building a new affiliate site, we audited 26 sites in its market against 13 rules. None of the affiliates met all of them. Why the rules came first, and how they became part of the build.Wed, 16 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/ai-speeds-the-work-people-stay-responsible/https://evdevs.com/blog/ai-speeds-the-work-people-stay-responsible/AI makes investigation, comparison and iteration affordable at a scale that used to be impractical. It also makes confident mistakes. How we split the work: what AI does, what stays human, and how we review what it produces.Tue, 15 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/a-confident-wrong-number/https://evdevs.com/blog/a-confident-wrong-number/A close rate that read 100% when the truth was 50%, feeding seven reports a sales manager would act on. How it happened, why we fixed it at the source, and what to check in your own dashboards.Mon, 14 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/the-cost-of-an-ai-feature/https://evdevs.com/blog/the-cost-of-an-ai-feature/What an AI feature really costs is a number per unit of value: per lesson, per answer, per document. How to estimate it, get the quality right first, then bring the cost down with model routing, caching and batching.Sun, 13 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/mcp-connecting-ai-to-your-tools/https://evdevs.com/blog/mcp-connecting-ai-to-your-tools/MCP lets one integration serve every AI assistant your team uses. How to expose your systems through it without handing a model more power than it needs: narrow tools, read-only first, approvals and a log of every call.Sat, 12 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/just-funded-instrument-before-you-accelerate/https://evdevs.com/blog/just-funded-instrument-before-you-accelerate/New funding means pressure to show traction fast. The numbers you will be judged on are only as good as the measurement under them. What to set up in the first weeks.Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/prompts-are-code/https://evdevs.com/blog/prompts-are-code/A prompt decides what your AI system does, so change it the way you change code: in version control, reviewed, tested against fixed examples, and recorded on every output so you can explain it and roll it back.Thu, 10 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/building-a-school-platform-with-an-ai-pair-programmer/https://evdevs.com/blog/building-a-school-platform-with-an-ai-pair-programmer/97 code changes, 74 of them written together with an AI coding assistant. How we built SuperEscuela’s student app and teacher records system, and the rules that kept the AI useful and the data safe.Wed, 09 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/testing-a-rag-system/https://evdevs.com/blog/testing-a-rag-system/A RAG demo answers the questions its builders thought to ask. How to test retrieval and answers separately, check citations automatically and agree a pass mark in advance, so your team can rely on what it says.Tue, 08 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/ten-percent-of-searches-half-the-visits/https://evdevs.com/blog/ten-percent-of-searches-half-the-visits/We sorted 431,227 searches by intent to buy. A small slice brought about half the visits. Why intent, not volume, should decide what you write and fix first.Mon, 07 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/rag-that-answers-from-your-data/https://evdevs.com/blog/rag-that-answers-from-your-data/Most RAG failures are data failures that retrieval exposes. What must be true before retrieval, from sources of truth and permissions to citations and hybrid search, so your assistant answers from your knowledge base.Sun, 06 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/from-prototype-to-production/https://evdevs.com/blog/from-prototype-to-production/The grouped checklist that turns a working prototype, often built fast with AI tools, into software customers can rely on: ownership, security, data, quality, operations, costs and people.Sat, 05 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/dating-a-traffic-drop/https://evdevs.com/blog/dating-a-traffic-drop/“Traffic fell” is not a diagnosis. How we line up search data, releases and server logs until every step of a decline has a date and a cause.Fri, 04 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/apis-that-fail/https://evdevs.com/blog/apis-that-fail/Every external API will time out, throttle you or change without notice. The patterns that keep an integration correct when that happens: backoff with jitter, idempotency keys, retry budgets, dead-letter queues and reconciliation.Thu, 03 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/build-on-your-own-accounts/https://evdevs.com/blog/build-on-your-own-accounts/Who holds the repository, the cloud account and the AI keys decides how easy it is to change partners, hire a team or raise the next round. Why we build on the client’s own accounts from the first day.Wed, 02 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/half-your-visitors-may-be-bots/https://evdevs.com/blog/half-your-visitors-may-be-bots/On one site, 55% of the visits analytics reported were bots, and real engagement was 22.4%, not 8.9%. Why it matters for every decision you make, and how to separate people from bots.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/least-privilege-for-ai/https://evdevs.com/blog/least-privilege-for-ai/An AI agent can do exactly as much damage as its credentials allow. How to scope keys, tokens, tools and write access so your AI integrations stay useful and contained.Mon, 31 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/connect-your-own-crm-in-one-click/https://evdevs.com/blog/connect-your-own-crm-in-one-click/Self-serve software cannot ask every customer to copy an access key and book a call with their admin. How we built a one-click, read-only CRM connection, and why “what you did not share” deserves a screen of its own.Sat, 29 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/ai-risks-in-plain-language/https://evdevs.com/blog/ai-risks-in-plain-language/Six real ways an AI feature goes wrong, from confident wrong answers to surprise bills: what each looks like in practice, and the plain controls that keep each one small.Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/security-policy-hiding-your-revenue/https://evdevs.com/blog/security-policy-hiding-your-revenue/A site’s own security settings were silently blocking its analytics and ad tracking, while one bot out-crawled Google. Two security findings from the first month of an engagement.Wed, 26 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/guardrails/https://evdevs.com/blog/guardrails/Guardrails turn “the model should not do that” into rules the system enforces. How to set them on what goes in, what comes out and what the AI is allowed to do, and how to test and maintain them like code.Mon, 24 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/test-the-paths-that-have-never-run/https://evdevs.com/blog/test-the-paths-that-have-never-run/A billing error would have given top-tier customers a fifth of what they paid for. It was waiting in a feature nobody could test yet. How one round of hands-on review found it, and 30 other problems, before the first invoice.Sat, 22 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/governability/https://evdevs.com/blog/governability/An AI feature is governable when you can say which prompt, model and settings produced any output, who approved that version, and how to go back to the previous one. How to build that in from the first release.Thu, 20 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/build-buy-or-wait/https://evdevs.com/blog/build-buy-or-wait/A plain decision guide for leaders: when an off-the-shelf AI tool is the smart move, when building your own pays off, when waiting is the better call, and how to combine them.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/proven-likely-or-unknown/https://evdevs.com/blog/proven-likely-or-unknown/Most status reports mix facts, hopes and guesses in the same tone. Three labels fix that. How we write the weekly report on every engagement.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/human-in-the-loop/https://evdevs.com/blog/human-in-the-loop/Human review makes AI safe to act on, but only when it sits at the right points and people can actually do it well. Where to place reviewers, how to design the approval step, and how to turn every correction into evidence.Sat, 15 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/built-for-the-oldest-phone/https://evdevs.com/blog/built-for-the-oldest-phone/SuperEscuela is a free school for Spanish-speaking children who may have an old phone and a weak signal. The technical choices that follow from that, and why “light” is a feature, not a compromise.Thu, 13 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/tests-for-people-who-never-wrote-them/https://evdevs.com/blog/tests-for-people-who-never-wrote-them/What an automated test is, why it matters more when AI writes the code, which few tests to start with, and how to tell whether the tests an AI tool wrote actually check anything.Thu, 13 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/limit-the-blast-radius/https://evdevs.com/blog/limit-the-blast-radius/Every integration and every AI feature will fail at some point. Deciding in advance how far that failure can spread is what keeps one bad source, one bad deploy or one bad model output from taking the rest of the business with it.Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/ingestion-normalization-trust/https://evdevs.com/blog/ingestion-normalization-trust/An AI assistant for legal and healthcare practitioners is only as good as the records it can read. What we learned owning the integration and data layer of such a platform, and why calling an endpoint is the easy part.Sat, 08 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/is-the-ais-code-any-good/https://evdevs.com/blog/is-the-ais-code-any-good/Six signals anyone can check in an afternoon, plus the questions to ask the AI tool and a reviewer, so you know whether the code your project runs on is ready to trust.Fri, 07 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/observability-for-ai-features/https://evdevs.com/blog/observability-for-ai-features/When an AI feature misbehaves, you need to know which request, which prompt and which model did it, and what it cost. What to log, trace and watch so you can answer that in minutes, not days.Wed, 05 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/the-right-model-not-the-cheapest/https://evdevs.com/blog/the-right-model-not-the-cheapest/SuperEscuela started writing lessons with the smallest, cheapest AI model. We measured the quality against what children deserve, and moved to a larger one. Why the saving was never worth it, in numbers.Mon, 03 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/ai-gateway/https://evdevs.com/blog/ai-gateway/When every feature calls AI providers directly, keys, costs and personal data end up scattered across the codebase. One internal gateway gives you a single place to control them, and lets you change models without touching a feature.Sat, 01 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/senior-team-or-first-hires/https://evdevs.com/blog/senior-team-or-first-hires/After a raise, the instinct is to hire. Hiring is right, but it is slow, and the first months decide what the next round sees. When a senior team that ships from week one makes more sense, and how it should hand over.Fri, 31 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/consolidating-many-sites-into-one/https://evdevs.com/blog/consolidating-many-sites-into-one/Many organisations end up running a dozen sites that drifted apart. What we have learned merging them into one platform, and shrinking the code while everything stays live.Wed, 29 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/never-paste-into-a-chat/https://evdevs.com/blog/never-paste-into-a-chat/Keep your keys, your customers’ data and your contracts safe while still getting help from AI chats. What should never go in, why it matters, what to do instead, and the steps to take if it already happened.Wed, 29 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/the-ai-harness/https://evdevs.com/blog/the-ai-harness/A model call is easy to add and hard to depend on. The harness around it, from prompt templates and schema validation to fallbacks and provenance, is what turns a model into a feature people can act on.Mon, 27 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/webhooks-or-polling/https://evdevs.com/blog/webhooks-or-polling/An AI assistant that reads yesterday’s data gives yesterday’s answers, with full confidence. How to choose between webhooks, polling or both, and how to keep the data your AI reads as fresh as the decisions it supports.Sun, 26 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/how-to-trust-an-ai-score/https://evdevs.com/blog/how-to-trust-an-ai-score/An AI that rates leads, deals or documents is only useful if people can check it. The six things we build around every model before its scores reach a sales team.Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/agent-or-workflow/https://evdevs.com/blog/agent-or-workflow/Most AI features are more reliable, cheaper and easier to test as a fixed workflow with AI in a few steps. How to tell when an autonomous agent is worth its cost, with a checklist you can use on your next feature.Wed, 22 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/what-an-ai-feature-really-costs/https://evdevs.com/blog/what-an-ai-feature-really-costs/An AI feature has two price tags: building it and running it. What drives each one, from volume and model size to the quality bar, how to estimate the cost of one useful result, and how to set budget alerts before the bill surprises you.Tue, 21 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/scoring-calls-against-your-own-scorecard/https://evdevs.com/blog/scoring-calls-against-your-own-scorecard/A sales-coaching client had a scorecard proven by hand. We taught a product to score real calls against it, with evidence quoted from every call. What made the scores worth trusting.Mon, 20 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/data-contracts/https://evdevs.com/blog/data-contracts/Integrations break quietly when two systems disagree about what a record looks like. A data contract makes that agreement explicit, testable and owned, so bad data stops at the boundary instead of reaching your reports and your AI.Sat, 18 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/the-first-eight-weeks-of-an-ai-product/https://evdevs.com/blog/the-first-eight-weeks-of-an-ai-product/A sales-coaching expert had a method proven by hand, a clickable mockup and an 8-week plan. The core product was working in eight weeks, as planned. Week by week, what that took, and how risks were handled along the way.Wed, 15 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/questions-before-an-ai-project/https://evdevs.com/blog/questions-before-an-ai-project/Ten plain questions that turn an AI idea into a project with a clear outcome: the number to move, the data, who checks the answers, cost per use, who owns it, and what happens when it fails and after launch.Sun, 12 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/your-ai-built-app-is-missing/https://evdevs.com/blog/your-ai-built-app-is-missing/An app built with AI tools can work well on your screen and still be unsafe for customers. The pieces usually missing, from logins and secrets to backups, cost limits and monitoring, and a prioritized list to work through before launch.Wed, 08 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMThttps://evdevs.com/blog/demo-or-system/https://evdevs.com/blog/demo-or-system/A demo proves an idea can work once; a system keeps working with real data, real users and real mistakes. What a demo hides, the signs of a real system, and the questions to ask before you pay or launch.Fri, 03 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT