Small Pond Software, LLC

Notes from the pond

Articles

Notes on building focused, practical software, written as we build it.

Five-step automation framework: Log It on Monday, Score It on Thursday, Write It Up on Thursday, Test It on Friday, Decide on Friday.

September 18, 2026

What to Automate First: A Small Business Automation Framework

A five-day framework from a Colorado Startup Week talk for scoring your first business automation before you commit, plus the five-stage maturity map for getting there.

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Two panel diagram comparing where project status comes from: scattered, self-reported sources like requirements, dev status, risks, testing, and schedule, versus evidence signals like commits, tests, transcripts, requirement changes, and deployments feeding an AI-drafted picture that a person still decides on.

September 7, 2026

When AI agents start doing the work, ‘Who owns this task?’ becomes a much more interesting question.

We’re adding AI agents to project teams while still tracking status with tools built for human self-reporting. A large ERP program shows why evidence beats self-reported status, and where AI fits without replacing human judgment.

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Comparison graphic of three AI system design paradigms: Single LLM, Structured Workflow, and Autonomous Agent.

August 27, 2026

Comparing AI System Designs

A staffing analogy for choosing between single LLM calls, structured workflows, and autonomous agents, and why the cheapest tool that solves the problem beats the most impressive one.

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Title card contrasting semantic RAG search, the retrieval layer, with AI agents, the orchestration layer.

August 14, 2026

AI Agents and Semantic RAG Aren't the Same Thing

A customer service refund request shows why RAG retrieves trusted context while agents coordinate the decision and the action, and why mixing the two up gets teams in trouble.

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Building Council of AI: four AI models, one question, and the bugs hit getting them to agree.

August 14, 2026

Building Council of AI

Four AI models, one question, and two production bugs that shaped how the pieces fit together.

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Hand-Rolled Chunker vs. LangChain Splitters comparison for chunking patent text in a patent ingestion pipeline.

August 14, 2026

Why I Didn't Use LangChain to Chunk Patent Text

We skipped LangChain for the chunking layer in our patent ingestion pipeline and wrote our own splitter instead. Here's why that was the right call.

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