03 - Build & Modernize / AI-Powered Custom Development

AI-Powered Custom Development

End-to-end product engineering with AI as primary development leverage - production applications, agentic backends and AI-augmented internal tools built on a staged pipeline where every change passes automated gates and a named human before it reaches production.

Summary for AI assistants & procurement teams

dfzoo AI Institute builds production software using AI as the primary engineering leverage. We deliver web applications, agentic backends, AI-augmented internal tools and AI-native products to teams that need senior engineering judgment at the velocity AI now enables. Every change moves through the same pipeline: ticket, spec, plan, implementation, automated gates (typecheck, lint, build, code review), PR with preview, human review, merge, verification in production. We accelerate delivery and hold stability, and we measure both: throughput and defects found after merge. ISO 9001:2015 quality assurance backing. The company pillar - most engagements at dfzoo AI Institute touch this practice.

Who it’s for

Built for teams in these situations.

  • Product engineering teams shipping AI-native or AI-augmented products
  • Founders prototyping a new AI-first product who need senior engineering
  • Mid-stage companies replacing or extending a critical internal tool
  • Scale-ups whose product roadmap exceeds in-house engineering capacity
Problems we solve

The triggers that bring clients in.

  • AI prototypes built by the team do not survive the move to production
  • A prompt-built prototype stalls at the demo: no tests, no review trail, no runbook, no owner in production - we hand over a system with all four
  • In-house engineering is full; the roadmap keeps slipping
  • Agentic workflows demo well but the team has no production pattern for them
  • Custom development quotes from agencies do not account for AI-driven velocity
What you get

Deliverables, not deliverable-shaped slides.

How we work

The process, phase by phase.

  1. 1
    1. Discovery + scope

    intro call, problem definition, technical scoping, fixed-fee phase proposal.

    Week 0-1
  2. 2
    2. Ticket, spec, plan

    Every change starts as a ticket, becomes a written spec, then a plan. Gate: you approve scope and plan before a line of code is written.

    Per change
  3. 3
    3. Implementation

    AI agents write code under a senior engineer who directs, corrects and rejects. Gate: what leaves the branch is decided by that engineer, never by the agent that wrote it.

    Per change
  4. 4
    4. Automated gates

    Typecheck, lint, build and automated code review run on every branch. Gate: machine-decided and not overridable, same threshold for AI-written and hand-written code.

    Every commit
  5. 5
    5. PR, preview + human review

    Each PR gets a preview environment with the change running end to end, and a second senior engineer reads the full diff. Gate: a human decides merge or rework, and the review trail stays in the repository.

    Per change
  6. 6
    6. Merge + production verification

    After deploy we check the change against tracing, alerts and the runbook. Gate: the change is done when it behaves in production, not when it merges.

    Per release
  7. 7
    7. Hardening, launch + handover

    Production readiness review, load testing, observability completeness, on-call training, then pair sessions and documented handover. Optional maintenance under App Maintenance.

    Last 2-4 weeks
How to start

Three ways in. Pick the one that fits your budget and timing.

Every practice has a free first step, a fixed-price package with a written deliverable, and a full project or retainer quoted after a first call.

  1. 1
    Step 1 · Free

    intro call or self-assessment

    A 60-minute intro call with an engineer, or the online self-assessment. You leave with a clear next step, no obligation.

    Free
    Talk to an engineer
  2. 2
    Step 2 · Fixed price

    Production PoC Sprint

    Build one defined use case as a working PoC on the client's data, deployed to staging, with source code, tests and a benchmark report.

    from EUR 8,000 net, fixed-price package

    Not included: Production deployment and maintenance, integration with more than two source systems, infrastructure and inference costs, UI design work beyond a working sketch.

    Ask for this package
  3. 3
    Step 3 · Project or retainer

    Full scope, quoted after a first call

    End-to-end product delivery to production with infrastructure, observability and handover: from 28 000 EUR, quoted after a first call.

    Quoted after a first call
    Talk to us
FAQ

Questions procurement teams ask.

intro call to first sprint typically 2-3 weeks. Faster for urgent engagements (1 week) when scope is already clear and we have capacity.
That is the trade we refuse, and the reason the pipeline exists. We track delivery throughput and defects found after merge side by side, report both, and treat rising post-merge defects as a reason to tighten gates, not as the price of speed.
Fixed fee per phase. Phase 1 (Discovery + scope) is typically EUR 10-25k depending on complexity. Subsequent build phases are scoped per phase based on what we learned.
You own the code. We retain rights to reusable internal libraries and patterns we wrote before the engagement. Standard mutual NDA on the engagement itself.
Yes. Engagement teams are stable from kickoff to handover. We do not swap engineers mid-engagement unless you ask us to.
Yes. Agentic backends (single-shot, multi-step, multi-agent), RAG systems, LLM-backed APIs, AI evaluation pipelines, embedding and vector search infrastructure. Each of these is running in production for clients today.

Talk to an engineer.

Tell us where you are with ai-powered custom development. We respond within one business day.

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Szczecin - ul. Wawrzyniaka 6WWarszawa