Writing on Seaway Labs

How to Know If Your Business Is Ready for AI

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Most articles on this topic are written by companies that sell AI products. The conclusion is always the same: yes, you’re ready, here’s how to get started, contact us.

We build AI implementations for businesses, so we have a commercial interest in this question too. The difference is that we also tell people when the answer is no — which happens often enough to be worth writing about.

Why Lawyers and Accountants Can't Just Use ChatGPT With Client Data

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The AI productivity argument is now compelling enough that most professional services firms have stopped arguing against it. The question has shifted from “should we use AI” to “how do we use it without creating a problem.”

The answer a lot of firms have landed on is: carefully. Use ChatGPT, but don’t put anything sensitive in. Use it for drafts, not for real files. Use the enterprise version — that one’s supposed to be fine.

The Quote-to-Invoice Gap: Where Trades Businesses Lose Hours They Can't Bill For

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There is a version of this story that plays out in almost every trades business past a certain size. The technicians are busy. The schedule is full. Revenue looks healthy. And yet the owner and the office are perpetually underwater, the invoices are running three days behind, and nobody can explain exactly where the time goes.

Why We Scope Before We Estimate

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Every studio has a version of this story. A client comes in with a project, the studio sends back an estimate, work begins, and somewhere around week eight the estimate is revealed to be fiction. The budget doubles. The timeline slips. Relationships fray. Sometimes the project recovers; sometimes it does not.

The Real Cost of a Poorly Documented Codebase

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Technical debt has a perception problem. It gets discussed as a future concern — something to address when the product is bigger, the team is larger, there is finally a quiet quarter. There is never a quiet quarter.

The debt is accruing right now, in the absence of documentation, in the architectural decisions that exist only in the memory of whoever made them, in the code that has never been explained to anyone. The cost is not deferred. It is distributed invisibly across every hour your team spends working in the codebase.

React Native in 2025: When It Is Enough and When It Is Not

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The native-versus-cross-platform question gets asked at the start of almost every mobile engagement we take on. The honest answer — which is unsatisfying but correct — is that it depends. But the factors it depends on are more specific than most articles acknowledge, and the tradeoffs have shifted meaningfully over the past two years.