P5 urgentSystem event
Critical Prentice eventAI summary · Production health event requires immediate review.
Suggested action · Inspect the affected workflow and recent events.
Andrew Lepard · Product Engineer · Denver, CO · works remote
I turn messy operational problems into software people depend on.
I'm an AI-native product engineer. Last spring I took Prentice, a lead-response platform for home-service businesses, from a blank page to production in under two months, working with AI agents daily and owning every decision myself. It's been answering real leads for a real business every day since.
01LEAD IN
02PARSED
03FIRST TOUCH
04SURVEY
05ESTIMATE
06WON
Step 01LEAD IN
9:12 PM. A homeowner submits a quote form.
D. Whitfield · GoldenLEAD IN9:12 PM. A homeowner submits a quote form.
PARSEDDetails extracted into a clean record.
FIRST TOUCHReply sent in seconds, automatically.
SURVEYRooms, photos, square footage come back.
ESTIMATEThe owner sends the quote with one click.
WONBooked. A biweekly recurring customer.
Flagship
prentice.pro
A lead comes in at 9 PM. Nobody's at a desk. My software answers in seconds.
Home-service businesses work hard for leads, then lose them to slow follow-up: the quote that goes out two days late, the customer who never hears back. I saw it happen at a Merry Maids franchise, so I built the system I'd want running my own pipeline.
When a new lead comes in, Prentice creates a clean lead record and sends a first reply within seconds. It gathers property details and photos through a mobile survey, creates a ‘send estimate’ task with everything attached, and follows up automatically until the customer replies.
01
A durable foundation underneath: a carefully designed database where every customer's information is completely walled off from everyone else's.
02
Built to respect the customer: no messages outside 8 AM to 9 PM, do-not-contact lists enforced, and emails that fail to deliver surface before a lead is left waiting.
The demo below is a simplified but faithful version of the real product. Follow a new lead through the workflow and see how the system responds.
Enter the live demo →
One codebase. Every pocket. Even your wrist.
Prentice ships as a web app and dedicated iPhone and Android apps, all built from one shared codebase. When it’s time to send an estimate, a notification and direct link put the right lead within reach on a phone, desktop, or the watch on the owner’s wrist. Designed, built, and shipped by me.
The next step, ready everywhere at once.
Side project
For fun, I built our house a morning briefing.
There's an Apple TV in our bedroom running a dashboard I wrote in SwiftUI, connected to the smart-home system I run for our house. It greets us in the morning, shows the forecast and current conditions, pulls our family calendar and figures out drive time to the first event, shows how far family members are from home, and keeps an eye on my wife's voiceover orders with deadline countdowns. The smart-home automations around it wake the screen about half an hour after sunrise and put it to sleep at bedtime.
It’s the same instinct I bring to product work: notice the people and routines involved, then build something that makes their day simpler.
Weather, calendar, commute, and home status in one place.Built around the routines our household actually has.Helpful before we ask, quiet when we don’t need it.Clear about what it knows and when a source is behind.
- Weather, calendar, commute, and home status in one place.
- Built around the routines our household actually has.
- Helpful before we ask, quiet when we don’t need it.
- Clear about what it knows and when a source is behind.
Internal tool
AI with boundaries.
SupportIO runs customer support for Prentice. It reads the support inbox, organizes messages into tickets, watches product health, and uses AI to give each ticket a priority, a short factual summary, and one suggested next step. Just as important is what it deliberately doesn’t do. It never replies to a customer on its own, and if the AI is unavailable, the rest of the support workflow keeps moving.
Useful AI has the right job, the right context, and the right level of autonomy.
Triage queue
Bounded triageP3Email
Support mailbox requestAI summary · Customer is asking for help with an existing workflow.
Suggested action · Review the ticket thread before replying.
P2Email
Product questionAI summary · Non-urgent question with no reported system failure.
Suggested action · Confirm the expected behavior.
Other things I've built.
Willow
01My wife was paying for a life-organizer app, so I built her one instead. Tasks, meals, groceries, and her creative projects in one elegant, installable app that works offline and syncs when she signs in.
Our smart home
02Our house runs on a Home Assistant setup I built and maintain. It knows when we’re home and where we are in the house, so the lights respond without anyone having to think about them, and automations like waking the bedroom TV to show the morning dashboard half an hour after sunrise happen on their own.
MIDI Translator
03A small custom tool that lets me adjust my studio volume from my Stream Deck. It runs on my computer and controls the audio interface that feeds my speakers, while a companion app starts and stops it automatically when I switch speaker systems.
AI-native, human-directed.
I work with AI agents, Codex and Claude Code, every day. They help me move faster, but I set the direction, and nothing ships until I've reviewed it, tested the edges, and walked through the workflows myself on desktop and mobile. This site was built the same way, by a small team of AIs I directed.
Four decisions from building Prentice, and the reasoning behind them. This is what my judgment looks like in practice:
Tasks that reflect reality
In Prentice, a task only completes when the work actually happens. Sending an estimate completes the estimate task, so the owner can trust the pipeline without maintaining it by hand.
Texting, held for the right moment
The foundation for customer texting is built, including consent handling, but automatic texts are currently off. Instead, Prentice creates a task for the owner, keeping the customer relationship and the decision to send in the right hands.
One email means one email
A customer should never receive the same follow-up twice. Prentice uses several safeguards so a retry, crash, or duplicate click still results in one message.
Fix what can be verified
When something drifts out of place, overnight maintenance rebuilds it from the permanent event history. If the system cannot verify the right fix, it flags the issue for review instead of quietly making something up.
From front of house to full stack.
For more than a decade, I worked as a live audio engineer, most recently mixing front of house for a large, multi-site church, where Sunday comes whether you're ready or not. That work taught me important habits I now bring to software: understanding the whole signal chain, preparing for failure before it happens, staying calm while you fix it, and never letting the audience feel the complexity.
In early 2026, I turned that same discipline toward software. I'd already run a wedding videography business, led media for a church as it grew tenfold, and studied digital marketing. Across all of it, the through-line was the same: take a messy problem and build a dependable system around it. AI-native development gave me the leverage to take that work end to end. The result was Prentice, my lead-response platform, now used daily by a Merry Maids franchise.
I'm early in my software career. I learn quickly, work hard, and genuinely want to keep getting better at this.
What I don't have
I don't have ten years at a software company.
What I do have
I have a product that a real business uses every day, and I took it from a blank page to production in under two months.
Bring me the messy problem.
I'm looking for a remote role where owning messy problems end to end is part of the job.
andrew@lepardsolutions.com