Own software you can actually inspect.
The nine diseases
The ways AI-built software fails are repeatable
Three properties of the workforce — the workers never sleep, never refuse an order, and start every shift with no memory of the last one — produce nine diseases. Each one has a chapter and an ordinance you can hand to your own AI. Seven carry receipts from a real city; the eighth says on its own page that the field record is thin.
- 1Parallel SystemsTwo things doing one job — the worker never read the first
- 2Faucet FixesThe same problem returns months later wearing a new costume
- 3Confident Wrongness"It's working" — said evenly, with no proof, to an owner who can't check
- 4Amnesia DriftA rule set in March is silently gone by June
- 5Prompt-Shaped ArchitectureBuildings shaped like the conversations that made them
- 6Velocity DebtBuilt fast, cannot roll back, has never restored from a backup
- 7The Unverifiable MayorYou have no ledger, lamp, or wall you can read yourself
- 8Silent Scope DriftThe city became something nobody designed
The ladder
Three steps, in order
Nothing is gated. The first step is free and answers the question the other two are for.
A stranger walks your city — fourteen districts, three levels, never out of order.
Findings become work orders — $6,500 blocks, independent reviewer named on every one.
Pricing
What a survey costs
Fixed prices, published. Rush work carries a premium, never a discount.
THE CITY SURVEY — HAMLET
$4,500· 3 days
For cities moving no money and holding no regulated data
THE CITY SURVEY — CITY
By quote
Full 14-district engagement. Not published as a price until a 14-district engagement has actually been run at this tier — publishing an owner-tier price above anything ever executed would be Confident Wrongness — a claim without proof — on a price sheet
THE REMODEL
$6,500 / block
~2 days per remediation block (the case study's real unit), with the independent reviewer as a named, priced line item — the surveyor who builds the fix has left the inspector's chair, and the reviewer who caught six defects the builder missed is the proof that sells it
Proof
The first city this instrument surveyed was its own
Including what the survey missed, and the surveyor’s own eleven predictions — all dead on contact with evidence. Published under the builder’s name.
“Can you verify any claim a worker makes, yourself?” — “No.”“What do you accept on faith because you can’t check it?” — “Everything.”
Bring the questions you could not answer.
That list is the beginning of the map.