Blog
Short articles on the repetitive work inside small businesses: what can be automated today, what it costs, and what it saves.
Every reading app is paid to keep your child on a screen longer. Verso does the opposite: a real book in hand, a handwritten page, one photograph. Grammar, phonics, comprehension and reading level off that photo, and a separate level for every subject. By Michael Hairetis.
Direct ordering costs about 3 percent against 15 to 30 for a marketplace, so why has nobody moved? Because it made you responsible for your own demand. Agents remove that objection and turn it into an integration problem. By Michael Hairetis.
A model that returns typed decisions with calibrated probabilities instead of text. I have been routing chat intent through an agent classifier since April. What I will not claim, what I will, and why the deterministic tier goes in front. By Michael Hairetis.
Programmers already went through this transition and consumers are next. Marketplace commission runs 15 to 30 percent, direct ordering costs about 3, and an agent that shops for you removes the interface that justified the gap. By Michael Hairetis.
The same agent infrastructure pointed at a learning platform for two children. Latency stops being a performance metric and becomes a design constraint you relocate. By Michael Hairetis.
The same agent infrastructure pointed at a daily publication instead of a scheduler. Three roles read the identical document and must not agree, the whole document-extraction layer got deleted, and every editorial bug turned out to be an agent following its orders exactly. By Michael Hairetis.
A year building an orchestration platform, and the piece that mattered was a thin wrapper letting ordinary code phone a coding agent over HTTP. Flat-rate economics instead of per-token, a product roadmap inherited for free, and the end of the four-hundred-line judgment function. By Michael Hairetis.
The same scheduled jobs ran seventy times and the planner re-derived its plan from scratch every morning. Two kinds of memory, neither wired up, forty kilobytes of agent notes nothing ever read back, and the truncation bug hiding underneath both. By Michael Hairetis.
The six workflows worth automating first — invoices, email, CRM, follow-up, filing, reports — the hours each returns, and what we'd tell you not to automate.
What consultants and agencies typically charge, the four things that actually drive the price, OpenRed's numbers stated in full, and the questions to ask anyone quoting you.
Zapier and n8n, a freelance developer, or a consultant with a platform: where each wins, where each breaks, and a decision rule you can apply in a minute.
Abraham Wald's bombers, Charlie Munger, and the pre-mortem: why "how would I guarantee failure?" beats "what's the plan?" — and the three five-minute questions we ask before every project. By Michael Hairetis.
A pipeline got slower the more it ran. Counting output by role found two thirds of it coming from the one agent with no tools, spending 76% of its review turns on data keys the agents had invented themselves. The structural fix cut agent chatter 2.5× with an identical delivered result. By Michael Hairetis.
Model capability arrives for free. Routing, fallbacks, observability and cost control do not, and that is where the operational wins still are. Four lessons from production, none of them about which model to use. By Michael Hairetis.
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