Everyone can vibe code a prototype. A working beta wins the deal

Everyone and their mother can vibe code a prototype. In a sea of AI-hyped consultancies, a working beta is the difference between storytelling and assurance.

Not a canned demo. Not a prototype that can't survive contact with the real world. A working beta on the prospect's real (NDA protected) data.

We wanted to convince a prospective client of two things:

📊 A dashboard they can query in plain language will benefit them

👥 We're the team to deliver it

The problem they already knew they had: visibility into their numbers. Company leadership doesn't log into their ERP, which has limited charting and isn't executive-friendly. They're keen to use AI as a competitive edge, but unsure how.

A few years ago, a beta version of that dashboard would have taken weeks. The math on giving it away didn't work: too much time for a payoff that might not come.

But Claude, paired with our own tooling for shaping requirements into LLM-ready work, streamlined the grunt work:

🌐 Navigating their server, which is in Spanish (which I don't speak)

🔍 Identifying the metrics available in their proprietary agricultural ERP

✅ Vetting which of those metrics are backed by data

🛠️ Assembling the findings into a working app

Same process I'd have followed before, just streamlined: scripts, parsing source materials at scale, agentic development.

The numbers are retrieved deterministically, not AI-generated, so every figure on the dashboard is real. Don't run your business on hallucinated numbers.

It's a beta. It will need refinement. But I didn't have to convince them of what I could build. I showed them how far I'd already gotten, in a fraction of the time it used to take.

That's negotiating from strength.