Docs-first delivery system
SaaS AI Starter
My role
System designer · developer tooling
2026
An opinionated starting point for teams building multi-tenant AI products, designed to make product, architecture, safety, and validation decisions explicit before implementation begins.
Architecture before acceleration.
required product and technical docs
delivery roles
automated validation workflow
01 · The problem
What needed to change
AI SaaS projects often begin with code while tenancy, billing, model policy, observability, and acceptance criteria remain undefined. That creates rework and inconsistent delivery decisions.
02 · The constraint
The hard part
The starter needed enough structure to guide teams without becoming a rigid framework that prevented stack substitutions or product-specific decisions.
03 · Decisions
How I approached it
- 01
Made canonical product and engineering documents the source of truth rather than relying on transient chat context.
- 02
Separated Architect, Builder, and Tester responsibilities to keep planning, implementation, and validation accountable.
- 03
Added a decision log for every meaningful stack substitution and tradeoff.
- 04
Created an automated validation script and GitHub workflow to protect the required template structure.
Technology