Claude Sonnet 4.6
AnthropicLong-context · tool use · production default
AI development services and AI development company work for teams shipping real production AI. Generative AI, ML, LLM agents, AI app development, RAG, and vision pipelines, model-agnostic across Claude and GPT, eval-tested, token-optimized. Operator team that uses Claude Code + OpenAI Codex daily. First workflow live in 30 days.
AI software development is the practice of designing, building, and operating production AI systems on top of large language models, vector retrieval, and orchestration frameworks. Unlike classical machine learning which trains a model on labelled data, AI software development composes pre-trained foundation models behind retrieval and tool-use layers. Unlike AI consulting, the deliverable is shipped code with audit logs, not a slide deck. The practice covers LLM apps and RAG, multi-step agents, vision pipelines for document and image work, and Realtime voice. Common stacks blend Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5, and open-source models with pgvector or Pinecone for retrieval, LangGraph for orchestration, and Langfuse for evaluation and observability.
Generative AI development services, AI app development services, machine learning development services, LLM agents, custom AI development, AI product development: covered by one operator team rather than six specialist vendors. Every pattern ships with an eval suite, audit logging, and a token-cost target.
Production GenAI applications: copilots, drafting tools, summarizers, classifiers, and structured-extraction pipelines. Claude or GPT picked per workload, eval set rebuilt against your real corpus, monitoring + retry policy shipped with it.
End-to-end AI app development: Flutter and web frontends, FastAPI or Node backends, vector retrieval, auth, billing, telemetry. Operator team that uses Claude Code + OpenAI Codex daily ships your AI app, not a slide deck.
Where the LLM isn't the right answer: forecasting, recommendation, anomaly detection, computer vision on edge. We rebuild the eval set, benchmark a baseline (XGBoost, scikit, PyTorch) against an LLM call, and ship whichever wins on your data.
Function-calling agents over your real systems: Salesforce, Slack, NetSuite, your repo. LangGraph or hand-rolled, whichever is simpler. Sub-second voice agents on the OpenAI Realtime API for call deflection.
When off-the-shelf SaaS doesn't fit. RAG over your private corpus (Notion / Drive / Confluence / pgvector / Pinecone), vision pipelines for invoices and claims, multi-vendor routing where compliance demands it. Built around your data model, not ours.
Zero-to-one AI product builds: concept validation, eval-first prototyping, design + engineering, and the 8-week production sprint. We co-build with founders who have a thesis and need an operator team, not a consulting deck.
Most AI engineering companies show a logo cloud. We show the layers: frontend, agents, data, infra, eval. Each opens to the tools we name, the production failure modes we've actually hit, and our default unless there's a reason not to. AI native software development isn't a label. It's whether the eval set exists.
Next.js or Astro for marketing surfaces and dashboards, Flutter where a single codebase needs to ship mobile + web. Streaming via SSE unless WebSocket is needed for bidirectional audio.
Hand-rolled Python tool loops for anything under ~6 steps; LangGraph when the graph branches. We pick Claude Sonnet for long-context tool runs, Haiku or GPT-5-mini for high-volume narrow tasks. Routing is a deliberate per-call decision, not a default.
pgvector on your existing Postgres for ≤2M chunks (operationally simpler, no extra vendor); Pinecone or Weaviate past that. Hybrid BM25 + dense retrieval + Cohere Rerank by default — the quality lift is bigger than picking a fancier embedding model.
Anthropic + OpenAI direct for fastest model access; Azure OpenAI or AWS Bedrock when compliance posture (HIPAA BAA, SOC 2, FedRAMP) requires it. Multi-vendor failover wired in for any workload above monthly run cost. A single vendor is a liability we won't sign off on.
Eval suite is the first thing we build, before any agent code. Langfuse for prompt + trace observability, Braintrust or a hand-rolled pytest harness for the golden set, shadow-mode mirroring before every cutover. If there's no eval, there's no ship — even from us.
Defaults reflect our current operator playbook (2026). Picked per workflow, not per partner badge — the rationale is in the per-layer detail.
Custom AI development isn't one product; it's three engagement shapes that serve different stages. Most clients arrive at the middle (pilot), some need strategy first, some need ongoing capacity. Same operator team, different cadence. The fit-test is the audit. The strategy-first path lives on our AI consulting page.
Engagement distribution from shipped client work. Your path may differ. The kill point on the pilot is non-negotiable; we'd rather lose phase 2 than ship a workflow that won't move the metric.
The "top AI development companies" listicles measure the wrong things: team size, year founded, awards. Buyers should grade on the operating practice. Here's the rubric we'd score ourselves on if we were on the other side of the discovery call.
tap pass / fail on each criterion · saved locally in your browser
Builds the eval suite before any agent code. Shows you the golden set and the regression test before shipping a feature.
"We'll add evals once it's working." Eval set is the engineer's three hand-curated prompts in a Notion doc.
Picks per workflow with the data. Will tell you why GPT-5-mini won the classifier and Sonnet 4.6 won the long-context summarizer.
Defaults to whichever model the founder posted about most recently on X. Single-vendor stack with no failover.
Projects per-workflow token cost before the contract. Has a written playbook for routing, caching, and batch APIs.
Quotes a project price but won't tell you what the model bill will look like at steady state. "That depends."
Names the specific tools their engineers use daily (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, LangSmith, Langfuse). Has a take on each.
Says "we use industry-leading tooling." Slides full of partner logos without a single named SDK or framework.
Will say "don't use us for this" or "that workload is wrong for an LLM." Recommends a non-AI baseline first.
Every workflow is a perfect fit. Every meeting ends with "we can definitely do that." Nothing is out of scope.
Shows actual production traces, anonymized capability patterns with metrics, a real repo or PR you can read.
Case-study page is stock-logo grids. "Trusted by" companies that turn out to be ex-employee LinkedIn networks.
Will deploy on Azure OpenAI / AWS Bedrock with BAA, PrivateLink, KMS. Has a DPIA template. Knows the SOC 2 questionnaire.
"Yes we're SOC 2." Can't produce the report or name the auditor. PII handling pattern is "we'll figure it out."
Fixed-fee audit, fixed-price pilot, monthly continuous. Published prices, no hidden tiers. Kill point on every pilot.
Custom-quote-only. Pricing pages that say "contact us." Pilot bills that mysteriously double in week 6.
Ships Claude and GPT in the same codebase. Has a routing layer. Treats vendor lock-in as a risk to be engineered around.
Single-vendor partner badge on the homepage. Will tell you whichever model you ask about is "obviously the best."
Engineers with public repos, talks, or articles. Open-source contributions you can verify on GitHub.
Generic team page with stock photos. The engineers you'd actually work with are never on the discovery call.
Copy this rubric into your next AI vendor discovery call. If the answer to any criterion pivots to a slide rather than a specific tool name, that's the data point.
LLM development company work that ships only one vendor is rarely about the model. It's about a partner badge. We pick across Claude, GPT, open-weights, and Gemini per workload on the eval data. The four cards on the right are how we frame the trade-off before we look at numbers.
Four tactics stacked. Each one independently saves money; together they typically bring effective token cost to 8–15% of the naive baseline, at the same eval-suite quality. The playbook is identical whether you're on Claude, GPT, or a multi-vendor router.
The shape is the same every time: eval set first, kill point written into the SOW, shadow-mode before cutover, token-optimization pass after. Most pilots ship in 5–8 weeks; the audit upfront is the part that prevents week-6 surprises.
We rebuild the eval suite against your real data, audit the candidate workflows, project per-workflow token cost, and pick the model per workload. You see the data, not our opinion.
We pick the highest-ROI workflow, draft the architecture, agree the success metric, and write down the kill point in the SOW. If the eval doesn't move during the build, we stop. No phase 2.
We build the workflow end-to-end against your real systems, deploy behind a feature flag, run shadow mode against your current pipeline (or manual baseline). You see quality + cost on real traffic before cutover.
Cutover behind the flag. We run the token-optimization pass: routing, caching, Batch API. Monthly cost-of-ownership and drift report from month 2 onward. Most workflows hit 30–60% cost reduction post-cutover.
Three anonymized capability patterns drawn from real engagements across fintech, healthcare, and ecommerce. Named references shared under NDA once we know what you're building.
Support team drowning in a long tail of "how do I configure X" tickets; tier-1 reps spending most of their time on a small set of repeating questions.
RAG agent over the product docs + past tickets, Claude Sonnet 4.6 for the synthesis step, Haiku 4.5 for the cheap classification step. Zendesk integration with draft-mode replies (human reviews before send).
Claims adjusters manually extracting fields from scanned forms + accident-scene photos; high error rate on multi-document submissions; backlog growing.
GPT-5 vision pipeline on Azure OpenAI (PrivateLink, BAA) reads photos + forms and returns structured JSON with confidence per field. Sub-threshold confidence routes to an adjuster with the AI's interpretation attached for review.
Marketplace listing fraud — fake listings, image-stolen products, copy-pasted descriptions. Pure-ML classifier hit a precision ceiling; pure-LLM was too expensive at listing-creation throughput.
Hybrid: XGBoost classifier on structured signals (account age, image hash, price delta) decides the easy cases; Claude Haiku 4.5 reviews the gray-band 8%. Disagreement routes to human moderation.
Deeper industry context: fintech AI development, healthcare AI development, and ecommerce AI development — each pillar covers compliance posture, eval shape, and shipped patterns for that vertical.
Further reading from our cluster: what AI software development actually means, 10 generative AI development use cases we've shipped, consulting vs build engagement shapes, how to grade top LLM development companies, and what responsible AI development looks like in production. AI application development services often start at one of these guides.
Same engagement shape as our other pillars, consistent across our Claude, OpenAI, and integration work. Most clients begin with the audit to scope, run a 5–8 week pilot on the highest-ROI workflow, then move to monthly for the next 3–5. Outcome-priced engagement — you hire AI developer capacity attached to a workflow with a kill point, not heads attached to a Jira board.
Find the AI workflows worth shipping before you commit a budget.
One AI workflow shipped end-to-end with eval data, not a demo.
Embedded squad shipping the next AI workflow on your roadmap.
One week, fixed-fee. We rebuild your eval set against your real data, rank the candidate AI workflows by ROI, project token cost at steady state, recommend the model + stack per workflow, and hand you a 90-day implementation roadmap. No deck, no obligation to build with us afterward.
AI development almost always overlaps with model-specific work, integration, or strategy. These pillars go deeper on each.
Production conversational AI on Claude Sonnet 4.6 + GPT-5-mini. RAG-grounded, confidence-gated, deployed to web / WhatsApp / Slack. The chat-specific build pillar.
Anthropic Claude integration, Sonnet 4.6 + Haiku 4.5 agents, the sibling model pillar.
GPT-5, Realtime API voice agents, OpenAI Codex: the other half of our model stack.
Plug Claude or GPT into Salesforce, Slack, NetSuite, and your existing systems.
Production workflow automation in 6–8 weeks. Agents doing the work, not assisting it.
Strategy and roadmap engagement before the build. Fit-test, not a gate.
Multi-step autonomous agents with LangGraph and model-agnostic tool use.
Realtime voice agents on OpenAI Realtime API, Twilio, Vapi, or Deepgram Voice Agent — the voice-channel sibling of the broader AI development engagement.