LucentCodeworks
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Software development agency

Software that survives
contact with reality

We build and repair the systems businesses actually run on — the complicated ones, the inherited ones, the ones that have to stay up. Small team, senior engineers, no layer of account management in between.

Start a conversation What we do
  • Direct access to the engineers
  • You own the code and the accounts
  • Scoped work, no open-ended retainers

Why teams call us

Usually it is one of four conversations

Every engagement starts with someone describing a problem they have been carrying for a while. These are the four we hear most.

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01 Product Engineering Ship the product your roadmap keeps promising — designed, built and maintained.
02 Platform & Infrastructure Make deploys boring, incidents rare, and cloud spend explainable.
03 Legacy Modernisation Untangle the system everyone is afraid to touch — without stopping the business.
04 AI & Applied ML Put language models into production without betting the product on a demo.
05 Custom Software Development For the process no product on the market actually fits — built once, properly.
06 SaaS Development Multi-tenancy, billing and onboarding — the unglamorous parts that decide whether it scales.
07 Web Application Development Serious applications in the browser — dashboards, editors, real-time tools that stay fast with real data.
08 API Development Interfaces other engineers have to live with — versioned, documented and hard to misuse.
09 Mobile App Development Apps that work on a bad connection, survive store review, and can be shipped weekly.

How we operate

The parts most agencies leave vague

Senior engineers, on your problem

The people who scope the work are the people who build it. There is no layer of account management between you and the engineering, and nobody is learning on your budget.

We will talk you out of things

A good deal of what gets scoped as a build is better solved by deleting something, buying something, or fixing a process. We would rather say that early than bill you to find out.

You own everything, always

Your repositories, your infrastructure, your accounts, from day one. No proprietary framework, no hosting lock-in, no leverage held over you at renewal.

Working software over status reports

Every two weeks there is something running you can click on. Progress that cannot be demonstrated is not progress we claim.

Selected work

What the work looks like

All case studies

Case studies are being written up. In the meantime, ask us directly.

Much of what we build sits behind an NDA, so you will not find a logo wall here. We are happy to walk you through specifics — including the parts that went badly — on a call.

How we engage

Pick the shape that fits the risk

Compare in detail

Fees depend on scope, so we quote after we understand it rather than before. What is fixed is the shape: what happens, how long it runs, and what you keep at the end.

Discovery Sprint

Deciding what to build, before committing a budget to building it

A short, fixed-scope investigation that turns an ambiguous problem into a plan you could hand to any competent team — including one that is not us.

Typical duration
1–2 weeks
Commitment
Fixed scope, fixed fee

Includes

  • Stakeholder and user interviews
  • Technical constraint and risk analysis
  • Architecture options with trade-offs stated
  • Scoped delivery plan with sequencing
  • Written recommendation, including "do not build this" where that is the answer
Scope a discovery sprint

Fee agreed after scoping. No commitment to that conversation.

Most common

Build Cycle

Getting a defined product or feature set shipped to production

A dedicated senior team working in two-week cycles against an agreed outcome. You see working software at the end of every cycle and can change direction between them.

Typical duration
From 6 weeks
Commitment
Rolling, cycle by cycle

Includes

  • A senior team sized to the work
  • Two-week cycles with a working demo at the end of each
  • Direct access to the engineers building it — no account layer
  • Your repositories, your CI, your review process
  • Production readiness and handover built into the plan
Discuss a build cycle

Fee agreed after scoping. No commitment to that conversation.

Technical Audit

Understanding a system you have inherited, acquired or lost track of

An independent read of a codebase and its infrastructure: what is actually there, what is at risk, and what it will take to fix. Useful before an investment, an acquisition or a rebuild decision.

Typical duration
1–3 weeks
Commitment
Fixed scope, fixed fee

Includes

  • Codebase, architecture and dependency review
  • Infrastructure, deployment and security posture
  • Test coverage and release-process assessment
  • Key-person and knowledge-concentration risk
  • Findings ranked by risk against remediation effort
Request an audit

Fee agreed after scoping. No commitment to that conversation.

Writing

How we think about this work

All writing

Next step

Tell us what is not working

Describe the problem in your own words. If we are the wrong people for it, we will say so and point you somewhere better.

Start a conversation See how we engage