TL;DR: Esuite went from a first codebase deleted on day two to a full rebuild. The lessons: guard automation before you run it, prefer auditable signals over free-form advice, and stop adding once it's time to replace.
Era 1, April 2026: delete the first codebase on day two
The commit landed on 2 April. On 3 April the commit message read "Remove v0 advisory system entirely." Day two, and the first version of the core feature was gone. There was v1 now.
April had 74 commits. In that month we built: phase registries for the data model, playbooks, a consultant chat with business frameworks, Nigerian market intelligence from RSS feeds, pilot access codes, a pulse digest, tracker and the foundation of an autonomous agent.
Then a faulty cron job wrote bad alerts. We had to purge them. I learnt my lesson that automation without guards is just a faster way to be wrong. By 25 April, every table had Row Level Security.
Era 2, May to June: from advice to signals to voice
Free-form AI advice sounds smart and is impossible to audit, so Advisory V2 moved to signal templates. Long document generations kept timing out on serverless, so a document design system was hoisted on an async queue.
June was the voice month: a workspace with WebRTC, onboarding, passkeys, and STT.
That month also included an embarrassing analytics flip-flop …. Finally, I retired our in-house analytics and brought PostHog back, but not choosing to trade privacy, it went behind our own relay.
Era 3, July to August: the quiet months
July had 8 commits. It was a thinking month. We shipped access logs, IP blocking and long-term memory, and I spent the rest of actually doing more system review and redraw on paper.
August produced the iteration that I am proudest of.
Era 4, September: the great rebuild (80 commits)
September is when I stopped adding and started replacing. Everything was now as clear as F!:
Stripping to advisory system V3. The Business Health Score became deterministic. We got persistent tasks, Web Push, and trustworthy memory with content hashes and supersession, and a trail that stays. Calls found their permanent home with Egress recording and our Scribe after we abandoned the Telnyx and Twilio evaluations, and we replaced Google Calendar scheduling. On pitch decks, every number on a slide now points to where it came from. Then, a design rule in the changelog informed onboarding v3, the strategy core built on Three Horizons and the Balanced Scorecard, and the empathy and care feature (see how my changelog kept holding it through?). And finally, a failure ledger, because systems should remember their own mistakes. Then a CI quality gate, and a governed agentic consultancy roadmap - the AI picks from the menu cooked with care. It doesn't write the menu.
Next: Prove It, Pay Less, Lock the Doors
Previously: I Still Can't Make a Ping-Pong Ball Bounce