Amin Ale

Production-safe backend & AI engineering

Offer 3 of 5 · AI feature retrofit

One AI feature, added to the codebase you already run.

Greenfield demo shops can bolt AI onto a blank repo. The hard part is shipping it inside a real product (your schema, your auth, your existing users) with PII redaction, cost caps, and an eval gate so it can't regress. That's the part I do.

For: small SaaS vendors posting "add AI to our product" or "fix our AI autocomplete" and naming a stack.

What ships with the feature

  • PII redaction (email, card, SSN, phone) before any prompt leaves your app, pattern-based, with an eval test asserting zero leakage across the recorded cases.
  • Response caching so identical redacted prefixes are served without a second model call.
  • A per-requester daily token budget enforced against logged usage, returning a clean 429 with retry-after when it's hit.
  • A feature flag gating the whole thing (404 when off) plus per-minute rate limiting on the route.
  • A provider-agnostic client interface, so the full test suite runs offline against recorded responses with no API key.
  • A data-driven eval gate in CI asserting exact output, zero PII leakage, and zero schema breakage, with a documented migration plan.

Proof: a real retrofit and the judgment behind it

Django 5 helpdesk copilot

Semantic ticket search, SQL-guarded ask-your-data, summarization with PII redaction, cost caps, and an eval gate, retrofitted onto an existing helpdesk with zero schema breakage. 61 offline tests.

Code

Laravel 12 + Vue 3 retrofit

Inline ghost-text reply autocomplete for a support desk: PII redaction, caching, token budget, feature flag, cost report, 25 offline Pest tests. Proves polyglot legacy comfort.

Code

AI Retrofit Playbook

Seven patterns: sidecar vs in-process, streaming, caching tiers, eval-gated deploys, fallback UX, cost guardrails, vendor-lock hedging. When to use each, and when not to.

Read playbook Code

Name the feature and the stack.

Django, FastAPI, Laravel, Rails: tell me the framework and the one AI feature you want. I'll come back with scope, guardrails, and a price.

amin.ale.business@gmail.com