I built a working website prototype with AI tools. What I am looking for is someone who works the way I want to work, several levels up: an AI engineer who can take something built this way and make it real, secure, and maintainable.
To be clear about what I am not looking for. I do not want to hand a spec to a web development shop and receive a finished website. I want a partner who is fluent in building with AI, who can tell me where the AI-generated foundation under this thing is fine and where it is quietly dangerous, and who can get the intelligence at the center of the product working properly. I want to be in the room while it is built rather than handed the keys at the end.
Where the project is today
A self-contained single-file web application, roughly 100KB, built with AI tools, that runs in any browser with no server
Around fifteen pages behind a client-side router
A working assistant that answers plain-language questions and returns structured results, currently running on hand-written rules rather than a model
All content lives in JavaScript arrays inside the file
No hosting, no database, no backend, no authentication
The assistant is the product
The assistant needs to run on a live model, answer only from my data, and never invent a fact. Users will ask vague, badly-phrased questions using the wrong vocabulary, and it has to handle that without guessing. One failure mode I have already hit in testing: a query returned three correct results and silently left out four others that also qualified. Nobody watching knew what was missing. Getting that class of problem solved, and provably solved, is the core of this job.
So I need someone with real opinions about retrieval and grounding, system prompt design, refusal behavior, handling ambiguous input, and how you test any of it. Specifically: how do I know the assistant is right, and how do I know a change I make next month did not break it?
What I need built
Everything built in my accounts and under my ownership from day one: repository, hosting, domain, database, model API keys
A real stack and hosting on a custom domain, with a deployment process I can run
A database as the single source of truth, with the content migrated out of the current file
The assistant on a live model, server-side, with proper key handling, retrieval grounded in my data, refusal behavior when the answer is not there, rate limiting and cost controls
An evaluation approach for the assistant. A test set, a way to catch regressions, and a way to measure completeness rather than just plausibility
A way for non-technical contributors to add and correct content without touching code
Security done properly and documented in plain language, including the AI-specific parts: API keys never reaching the client, prompt injection, what the model can and cannot see, abuse and runaway cost, plus the ordinary work of TLS, headers, secrets, backups, restores and dependency hygiene
You are a good fit if you have
Shipped LLM-powered products to production, not just demos
Built retrieval over your own structured data, and have been burned by it
Strong views on evaluating model output, and a practical method rather than a vibe
Worked with non-technical founders and can explain a tradeoff without dumbing it down or burying me
Fluency with the current AI build tools, and honesty about their limits
In your proposal, please answer these four questions.
Link one LLM-powered product you took to production. What was the architecture, and what broke in ways you didn't expect?
My assistant returned three correct results and silently omitted four that also qualified. Diagnose that from what I have told you, and tell me how you would prevent the whole category, not just the instance.
How do you evaluate an assistant like this? I want the actual method, including how you catch a regression after a change.
What is your honest read on the fastest path: rebuild on a proper stack, or extend what exists? Tell me why. Assume I will ask follow-up questions.
How this starts
A paid two- to three-hour working session where you walk me through your read of the prototype and the architecture you would propose. I will share the prototype under NDA once we are talking. If this goes well there is likely ongoing work beyond the initial build.