Load-bearing review
What breaks first?
A free 30-minute review for founders whose product started behaving differently once real users showed up.
You get it in writing the next day. One page.
No charge, and nothing to prepare.
Your product works. That isn't the same as being ready.
Your MVP worked fine at 300 users. At 3,000 it started timing out. Same code, same product, no bug. Success was the change.
That's the call I get most often.
Products rarely fail everywhere at once. They fail in a narrow band — an unoptimised query, a service with no retries, an auth flow nobody stress-tested. Everything holds until it doesn't, and it usually stops holding in front of people whose opinion matters.
The good news is that you probably don't need a rebuild. You need to know which 20% is carrying the weight.
Signs it's coming
Latency drift
Something got slower and nobody can say when.
Unknown failure
There's a spot where you'd have to guess what happens if it fails.
Sacred file
Your developer says "don't touch that file" more than once.
Single-user path
Something has only ever run with one person using it at a time.
None of these show up in monitoring. Monitoring tells you what already went wrong. These are the things people have quietly worked around.
What happens
We talk for 30 minutes. I'll ask about your stack, your traffic, and what you're most worried about. Then I'll tell you which parts are carrying the weight, which are likely to break first, and which you can safely leave alone.
The next day you get that in writing. One page: what to fix now, what can wait, what to ignore entirely. Short enough to forward to a co-founder or an investor.
Sometimes the answer is that you're fine and you don't need me. I'd rather tell you that in half an hour than three months into a rebuild you didn't have to do.
Who this isn't for
If you're pre-launch, or still deciding what to build, I'm probably not the right person yet. This is for products already in front of real users, where something has started to feel off.
Thirty minutes. One page. No charge.
Nothing to prepare. Bring the thing that's been nagging you.
Shahzaib Khan
I've spent 15 years shipping production systems for General Motors, SAP, Novartis, Telenor and L'Oréal. Before this AI wave started I was publishing peer-reviewed machine learning research: two papers in Elsevier journals, one granted patent. So when I open an AI-built codebase, I'm not guessing which 20% is holding the weight.
What founders usually come to me with
- An AI-built MVP that's cracking under real traffic.
- A security audit or an investor question they can't answer about their own architecture.
- Data and retrieval infrastructure that has to survive being wrong in public.
- A second opinion before rebuilding something that probably doesn't need rebuilding.
It usually starts as one call. I tell you which parts are actually at risk and which parts are fine, including the times when the honest answer is "you don't need me."
Some of what I've built along the way
- DataNests, turns company knowledge into agentic workflows.
- OnePush, transactional email and omnichannel delivery, built MCP-native for agents.
- WideLens, for consent, compliance and site scanning.
- Interns, a developer learning platform with a community past 85,000.
Every week I write WorkLens, on what AI is actually doing to the way work gets done. The invisible supervision labor. The judgment gap. What holds up in production and what quietly doesn't.
If your product is past the tutorial phase and starting to hurt, message me.