Worth reading.

Build journals, comparison breakdowns, postmortems, and analysis from a small AI engineering and advisory firm. Honest, sourced, occasionally opinionated. Written for the person making the buy decision - not the engineer running the build. Most posts include a TL;DR; longer pieces include FAQs and inline citations to the source data.

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Should you hire a full-time AI engineer, or work with a team like ours?

A 24-month total-cost-of-ownership comparison between hiring a senior AI engineer in-house and using a fractional team. With a worked example for a $25M business, an honest "when to choose full-time" section, and the math on both options.

by Archit comparison 14 min read updated April 26, 2026

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01 - all posts

Everything we've
published.

Filter by category. Comparison posts cover buy-vs-build decisions; how-to posts go deep on a single problem; build journals document our own work; analysis pieces look at the broader market.

/01 Should you hire a full-time AI engineer, or work with a team like ours? comparison Apr 26, 2026 → /02 How we keep your data private when building AI tools. how-to Apr 19, 2026 → /03 Why most AI pilots stall - and how to get yours into production. analysis Apr 12, 2026 → /04 Build log: how RetroLab Tech's own internal RAG ingests our knowledge base. build log Apr 5, 2026 → /05 Custom RAG vs. ChatGPT Enterprise: when buying off-the-shelf is the right call. comparison Mar 22, 2026 → /06 How to write an AI roadmap your board will actually approve. how-to Mar 15, 2026 → /07 The mid-market AI maturity model: five stages, where most teams actually are. analysis Mar 8, 2026 → /08 Build log: shipping eval-first development on a 7-week engagement. build log Mar 1, 2026 →