How to ship an AI feature in production in the United States

A notebook demo is not a product. Production means a logged-in user, a key that never hits the browser, a prompt you can version, a failure the rest of the app survives, and a switch to turn the feature off without taking down Stripe.

The checklist we use before “it works on my laptop”

If any line is missing, it is not ready for a customer in the United States who pays you.

• Auth: only their data, unless they explicitly share.
• Key: server environment, rotated, never in the repo or a screenshot.
• Timeouts and retries with a user-visible fallback, not a spinner forever.
• Rate limits per tenant so one customer cannot empty your bill.
• Monthly cost cap and an alert at 70%.
• Logs without secrets, retained on a schedule named in the privacy policy.
• Eval set of ≥20 anonymized real examples, run on every prompt change.
• Feature flag / kill switch in one deploy.
• Named model family in the SOW; change of vendor is a change order.
• No card data, no passwords, no full government IDs in prompts.

Privacy and processors

The privacy policy names the model vendor as a processor if prompts can include personal data. Retention matches what you told the customer. If you also take payments, checkout data and prompt data do not share a pipe.

How we write the statement of work

One feature. One success metric. One environment. Weekly clickable increments. Acceptance: evals pass and a person who is not the engineer completes the job on staging. You own the code. SINLE Technologies LLC bills in USD. If the use case is reckless (diagnosis, unsupervised legal advice, silent refunds), we will decline.

How I judge whether the idea is real

I ask three questions on the first call. What job did a person do last week that you want a machine to draft? Who checks the output before a customer sees it? What happens on Friday if we turn the feature off? If you cannot answer those, we are not ready to write a statement of work. We are ready to write the FAQ or the SOP first — and that is often the actual project.

I would rather decline a fashionable chatbot than ship something that lies about hours, stock, refunds or a diagnosis. The invoice has my company’s name on it. That is why the no’s are part of the work.

What you should have in writing before you pay anyone

The job in one sentence. The data the model may see. The human who confirms. The metric you will look at in 30 days. The kill switch. The legal name of the vendor. USD price and when the card is charged. Who owns the repo. If a vendor cannot put those on one page, you are buying a demo.

• Nothing is billed by us before you approve a written scope.
• Typical project billing is 50% to start and 50% on delivery, through Stripe.
• Code, design and prompts we write for you transfer on final payment.

The steps — do these in order

1. 01

   Write the job and the kill switch into the SOW

   If either is missing, you are not scoping software. You are buying a demo.

2. 02

   Auth first

   Only their data, unless they explicitly share.

3. 03

   Key on the server, cap the bill

   Per-tenant meters. Alert at 70% of the cap.

4. 04

   Twenty evals before any customer sees it

   Prompt changes re-run the set. Failures block the release.

5. 05

   Timeouts, fallback copy, no infinite spinner

   The rest of the product stays up if the vendor is down.

6. 06

   Logs without secrets, retention named in privacy

   You should be able to show a regulator what you keep.

7. 07

   No cards, passwords, or IDs in prompts

   Checkout and the model do not share a pipe.

8. 08

   Acceptance is a non-engineer completing the job on staging

   Then you own the code. Then we bill the rest. Then we can turn it off on Friday and Monday still works.

Keep reading

• Think. Build. Ship.

  Think. Build. Ship. — the only order that produces a product

  Think is understand the problem. Build is engineer the solution. Ship is put it into the real world. Skip one and you have a tutorial, a file, or a pitch — not a product.

• Tutorials

  Tutorials are not a product. A link is.

  You can finish a hundred tutorials and still have nothing to send. Shipping is a link that does a job — that is what SINLE Academy is for.

• Bootcamp

  SINLE Academy is not a coding bootcamp

  No job promise. No certificate as the product. Eight people, six weeks, $400 — you leave with work someone can use, not a placement story.