# Work with me: the AI engineer you slot into your team

Canonical URL: https://ai.stumason.dev/work-with-me

Your clients can see what AI could do. The hard part is knowing what is actually possible, what is not, where the data lives, and what it costs to keep running, and that is the part Stu Mason takes off an agency's hands. It almost always comes down to one of three kinds of build, set out below. He builds them white-label under your name, in plain English, and tells you straight when AI is not the answer. Also hands-on with the main voice and video stacks (AssemblyAI, OpenAI Realtime, Vapi, ElevenLabs, Fal), though not a specialist there: he knows what is real and what is demo-ware. Not his: training models from the ground up, trading bots, churning out content to sell. A few days a month, day rate on request. Folkestone, UK; works with agencies everywhere.

## The offer

### Answers from their own stuff

Point AI at their documents and data, and it answers from them, with the receipts, instead of guessing. Can stay on their own servers if privacy matters.

### AI that can actually do things

It gets into the tools they already use and does the job, rather than just chatting about it.

### Work that runs itself

A job on a schedule that sorts, checks or reports, with a person signing off before anything goes out.

## What it is like to work with me

Real, named people at real companies, agency clients first:

> We've worked with Stu for nearly ten years. When we sell a build we can't handle in-house, he's the call. Joins our Slack, matches our standards, delivers under our name. Clients never know. That's not something you get from a random contractor.
>
> Iggy H., Founder, London Design Agency (agency)

> Stu's been embedded with our team for over a year. Daily standups, same Linear board, same Slack. When we needed a maintenance tracking module built - tenant requests, status workflows, admin dashboards - he scoped it and shipped it in six weeks. Our clients think he's internal.
>
> Shawn M., Founder, Jetpack Labs (agency)

> Stu delivers. Quick turnaround, high quality, no fuss. He embeds into the team properly - standups, Teams, the lot - and he's been ahead of the curve on AI tooling, both in the apps we build and in how he works. Reliable, fast, and genuinely good to work with.
>
> Ravi P., Product Owner (agency)

## The proof

- [AI that runs your infrastructure](https://ai.stumason.dev/proof/coolify-mcp.md): Lets an AI safely operate a real platform, and hands it only what it can take in. Open source, thousands of installs a month.
- [Answers it can back up, or it says no](https://ai.stumason.dev/proof/rag.md): An assistant that answers from your own documents, shows where each answer came from, and refuses to guess when it does not know.
- [A storefront built for AI shoppers](https://ai.stumason.dev/proof/shop-template.md): A real shop an AI assistant can browse and check out from for a customer, payment included. A live demo you can try.
- [Your own AI engine, kept in-house](https://ai.stumason.dev/proof/crunch.md): The engine behind search, recommendations and content checks, running on your own servers. No per-use bill, and your data never leaves.
- [An agent that writes the news](https://ai.stumason.dev/proof/bellwether.md): One AI gathers the facts, another writes and cannot invent a single number, and a person approves before anything is published.
- [An assistant that runs operations](https://ai.stumason.dev/proof/tidylinker-ops-mcp.md): A live marketplace where an AI assistant can safely handle the day to day: users, jobs, payments and approvals, with secure sign-in and no risk of going off the rails.

## Questions agencies ask

**What do you charge, and how do you bill?**

Day rate, or priced by the job, whichever is cleaner for the work. I will give you a real number once I know what you are after, not one plucked off a landing page. The first-pass scope is free, so you will know roughly what something costs before you commit to anything.

**Is there a minimum, or is it genuinely ad-hoc overflow?**

Genuinely ad-hoc. Some agencies keep me on a few days a month, others just send a job when they are stuck. No minimum, and no retainer unless you want the certainty of reserved time.

**What capacity do you have, and how soon can you start?**

I keep room for overflow. Tell me the deadline and I will tell you straight whether I can hit it. If I cannot, I will say so rather than take it on and let you down.

**Can you work in our stack? What will you not touch?**

Laravel and React are home, but I work in whatever you or your client already use. You are buying the judgement and the patterns; the language is just the tool I happen to use. What I will not take on: training AI models from the ground up, trading bots, or churning out content to sell. If your job is one of those, I will tell you and point you somewhere better.

**Are you happy working under our brand, in our repos and process?**

Completely, that is the whole model. I work in your repos, match your PR style and branch names, use your Linear or Jira, join your standups, and talk to your team like one of them. Your client never knows I exist. I have been embedded in agency teams remotely for ten years.

**How much of the code is AI-generated, and how do you keep it safe?**

A lot of it. I use AI heavily to ship fast and I will not pretend otherwise. The difference is I do not let it raise a PR and hope. I watch the process: is it writing real tests, is it driving a browser to check the thing actually works, am I catching it when it is wrong? You get the speed of AI with a real person accountable for every line. Nothing goes near your client that I have not stood behind.

**Can I speak to references?**

Yes, on request. I have agency owners and clients I have worked with for years who will happily take a call or reply to an email about me. There are real, named reviews on the site too.

**Insurance, IP and NDAs?**

Yes to all. I carry professional indemnity (£1m), public liability (£1m) and employers liability (£10m), certificate on request. I will sign your NDA, and all IP in what I build is assigned to you or your client on payment, in writing.

**You are a one-person shop. What if you are ill mid-project?**

Fair question, and I will not pretend a solo shop has zero risk. What I do is make sure it is never your problem. Everything lives in your repos, tested and documented, shipped in small increments, so there is no half-finished black box only I understand. Your own devs can pick it straight up. The loops are short, so there is never much in flight; if something happened to me you would lose days, not a project. And I am insured for the professional side.

## Start a conversation

Email stu@stumason.dev. Real, named reviews: https://ai.stumason.dev/reviews. Case studies: https://ai.stumason.dev/work.

Machine-readable: the full index is https://ai.stumason.dev/llms.txt. There is also an open MCP server at https://ai.stumason.dev/mcp/stu you can connect to with no key, to read all of this, send Stu a message, or hand him a project brief.