Independent engineering studio — Colton & Cord
We write the software your roadmap keeps deferring.
CNC is two senior engineers. We take on custom builds, embed with in-house teams, and wire AI into workflows that have to survive production. You talk to the people writing the code — every week, for the whole engagement.
- 24
- Engagements shippedsince 2021
- 3.5 wk
- Median time to first deploynew builds
- 2
- People you actually talk tono account managers
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Work we take
Three shapes of engagement. Most clients start with one and move between them — a build that turns into a retainer, or an audit that turns into a rewrite.
- 01
Custom software builds
Greenfield products, internal tools, and the unglamorous platform work in between.
- Product & internal tools
- Data platforms
- Legacy migrations
We scope in weeks rather than quarters, ship in increments you can put in front of users, and hand over a repository your own team can read. No framework you have never heard of, no bus factor of one.
- 02
Embedded engineering
Drop us into the team and cadence you already run.
- Sprint-cadence contracts
- Code review & mentoring
- Architecture second opinions
We read the codebase before we touch it, pick up tickets from your board, and match your conventions instead of importing ours. Standups, code review, on-call rotation — we show up the way a senior hire would.
- 03
AI & automation
Retrieval, agents, and pipeline plumbing measured against real evals.
- Retrieval & search
- Workflow automation
- Eval harnesses
Every integration ships with a test set and a cost ceiling, so you know what it does before it touches a customer. When a model is the wrong tool for the job, we will tell you that on the scoping call instead of six weeks in.
Why two people
An agency bills you for the layers between you and the work. We removed them.
No project manager relaying decisions, no junior rotation learning on your budget, no discovery phase priced like a deliverable. The trade is honest: we can hold two engagements at a time, so we say no often. When we say yes, you get both of us on the code and a written plan you own whether or not you hire us.
How it runs
Four steps from first call to handover. Nothing here is a surprise later — the plan names what we are deliberately not building.
- 0145 minutes
Scope call
Both of us, no salespeople. We ask what breaks today and what a good outcome looks like in ninety days.
- 023–5 days
Written plan
A short document: the slice we would build first, what it costs, what we would deliberately leave out. Yours to keep either way.
- 03Weekly
Build in the open
Work lands in your repo from day one. A Friday note covers what shipped, what slipped, and what we need from you.
- 04Final week
Handover
Runbooks, architecture notes, and a walkthrough recorded for whoever joins after us. We stay reachable for thirty days.
Who you get on the call
Colton
Product engineeringSpends most of a project inside the product surface — interfaces, state, the seams where a feature stops feeling designed. Previously built internal tooling for logistics and fintech teams that outgrew their spreadsheets.
- TypeScript
- React / Next.js
- Design systems
Cord
Platform & dataHandles everything underneath — schemas, queues, deploys, and the part of the system that pages someone at 2am. Has migrated enough production databases to be genuinely boring about it, which is the point.
- Postgres
- Go / Python
- Infrastructure
Tell us what is breaking.
Scope calls are 45 minutes and free. If we are not the right shop for it, we will say so on that call rather than three weeks later.
- Phone
- +1 (312) 847-1928
- Where
- Remote — US Central