Blog
Insights.
On AI-powered delivery, enterprise software, and building what actually fits.
The build-vs-buy math changed while you weren't looking
AI isn't killing SaaS overnight, but it's quietly shifting the build-vs-buy calculation. Here's what that actually means for a small operations team deciding whether to renew.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
Case study: the CRM a 40-person tech company actually needed
A B2B software company was paying for a CRM their sales team barely used. We replaced it with a custom tool built around how they actually sold. Here's what changed.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
Most AI pilots fail. The AI isn't the problem.
MIT says 95% of enterprise AI pilots deliver no measurable ROI. The pattern behind the 5% that work is unglamorous, and it's the same pattern behind any good ops project.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
When a tool starts making work, it's stopped being a tool
SaaS fatigue isn't a pricing problem. It's a fit problem. Here's how to spot the tools in your stack that have quietly flipped from saving time to costing it.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
Case study: five SaaS tools, one internal app, and a saner ops team
An anonymized build story: how a 40-person services company replaced five overlapping SaaS subscriptions with a single purpose-built internal app, and what actually changed.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
Build for the business you have, not the one on your roadmap
Scoping software for a hypothetical future business is how you end up with tools nobody uses. Build for the workflow you actually ran on Tuesday.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
Case study: a healthcare client's coverage-gap problem, and what came after
A mid-market healthcare services client asked us to fix one report. Two years later, we run six of their internal tools. Here's how that happened, and why it's becoming the norm.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
Every SaaS tool has opinions. The question is whether they're yours.
Buying software means adopting someone else's workflow. Here's how to tell when that's a shortcut and when it's a slow, expensive detour.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
Horizontal AI keeps stalling. Narrow AI keeps shipping.
Broad AI copilots keep showing up in headlines and failing in pilots. The quiet wins are narrow, embedded, and boring on purpose.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
Case study: reading 400-page reinsurance contracts without reading them
How we built a contract intelligence tool for a mid-market insurance broker that surfaces exclusions and coverage gaps in minutes instead of days.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
Your AI shouldn't decide. It should hand your team the right work.
The wins we see in real ops aren't from autonomous agents. They're from augmentation — AI that preps the decision and lets a human make the call.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
Reviewing code you didn't write: the real work of AI-assisted delivery
Agents can generate a working feature in an hour. The engineering work that makes it safe to ship is what actually takes the time. Here's what that looks like on our team.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
'Buy, don't build' was good advice. It needs a footnote now.
For a decade the default answer was buy the SaaS. AI-assisted development is changing that math, and Retool's 2026 data shows engineering leaders acting on it.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
When an agent writes the code, what does the engineer actually do?
Agentic coding is real. But the delivery still lives or dies on the parts humans do. Here's how we split the work at Arkitekt, and where we refuse to hand off.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
The MIT '95% of AI pilots fail' stat, and what it actually means
The viral MIT number is real but oversimplified. The interesting story is the boring operational work that separates AI pilots that ship from the ones that stall.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
Case study: five SaaS tools, one dashboard, and a quieter Monday morning
An anonymized look at how we replaced five disconnected SaaS tools with one purpose-built app for a 22-person services firm — and what actually changed week to week.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
Scope for the business you have, not the one on your roadmap
Most custom software gets over-scoped for a future that never arrives. Build for the company you are today, and let the next version handle the next problem.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
Hedge funds are dumping SaaS. Your renewal cycle hasn't caught up.
Public markets are repricing enterprise software ahead of buyers. What the Goldman Sachs SaaSpocalypse signal means for the next renewal sitting in your inbox.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
Case study: the custom CRM that replaced HubSpot for a 12-person tech company
A B2B software client was paying $34K/year for a CRM their team avoided. We built them something smaller, cheaper, and actually used. Here's what changed.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
Managed infrastructure is the reason we can ship in days
AI-assisted delivery only works at speed when someone owns the runtime. Here's why we deploy to our infrastructure, not yours — and what that means for you.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
Your SaaS bill is going up 15% next year. Here's what you're paying for.
Gartner says enterprise software spend will grow 15.2% in 2026, but most of it is price hikes and AI line items you didn't ask for. A look at what that means for small teams.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
You don't need a platform. You need the thing that works on Tuesday.
AI made custom builds cheaper, which is why more teams are overbuilding. Here's why scoping to a single workflow beats scoping to a 'platform' every time.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
Agentic AI is mostly 'agent washing.' Here's what we build instead.
Gartner says 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by 2027. The fix isn't smarter agents. It's putting humans back in the loop on purpose.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
Case study: an insurance contracting intelligence platform built around the humans
How we built a contract intelligence tool for an insurance client that reads carrier agreements, flags risk, and keeps a person in the loop where it matters.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
What we still do by hand when an agent writes the code
AI agents can write a lot of the code. They can't tell you whether the result is the right thing, safely shipped. Here's where we keep humans in the loop and why.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
Case study: finding coverage gaps a healthcare client kept missing in spreadsheets
An anonymized writeup of how we replaced a brittle spreadsheet process with a small, purpose-built coverage-gap tool for a healthcare client — and what changed week one.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
Coding agents got fast in 2025. The hard part is what happens after.
Agents can write working code in minutes. Shipping it reliably to a real business is a different job. Here's the discipline we put around AI-assisted delivery.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
The build-vs-buy math just changed, and your CFO can feel it
Software stocks sold off in April on AI fears. For SMBs, the more interesting story is what that repricing means for your next renewal decision.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
Case study: how one custom app replaced five SaaS tools for a specialty contractor
An anonymized look at consolidating a 40-person contractor's CRM, scheduler, forms, inventory, and portal into a single purpose-built app — and what stayed our job after launch.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
The hidden tax of bending your workflow to fit your software
Most SMBs pay a quiet tax every day to keep their work shaped like their SaaS. AI-assisted development is making that tax harder to justify.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
What AI actually does (and doesn't do) when we build your software
AI writes a lot of our first drafts. It doesn't ship anything. Here's the honest version of how Arkitekt builds production software with AI in the loop.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
95% of GenAI pilots are failing. The 5% that work look boring.
MIT says most corporate GenAI pilots aren't delivering P&L impact. The wins we see are narrow, scoped, and human-supervised. Here's what that means for SMBs.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI
The SaaSpocalypse Was Obvious — Our Clients Saw It Coming
Wall Street finally noticed something our clients figured out a long time ago. AI has quietly eliminated the cost barrier that made custom software impractical for most companies.
Aaron McClendon · Founder & CTO, Arkitekt AI