Portfolio Intelligence Platform
14 Days. 290 Was the Estimate.
290 days. That was the estimate.
Four specialists: a frontend developer, a business analyst, a data modeller, a backend engineer.
One operator. No code. 14 active working days.
Session 1 — Blank Environment
Blank Snowflake environment. No prior context. Scope: build a portfolio intelligence platform for an energy retailer managing 14,768 sites.
FDB Phase — Data Foundation
9 active days. Sessions 1–15. Consumption stack, wholesale cost mapping, DUoS timeband structure (5 bands — the first significant domain correction), synthetic forecasts seeded.
Phase 1 — Core UI
5 active days. Sessions 16–27. 9 Streamlit application pages built: Home, Portfolio Health, Consumption, Gross Margin, Site Intelligence, Signals, Alerts, Forecasting, Reconciliation.
Phase 2 — Intelligence Layer
6 active days. Sessions 28–40. 7-agent Cortex AI swarm deployed. Full 14,768-site portfolio rebuild. Signal tables, alert tables, inter-agent handoff table.
PIP v1 Complete
14 active working days from blank environment. Core platform delivered.
Volta Suite + New Account Deployment Build
Volta Suite — the commercial and new account deployment layer. 7 additional active days. PIP + Volta: 21 active working days total.
Customer Demo and V2 Design
All 5 streams complete. 51 calendar days total.
In every fork across 119 sessions: domain expertise, not AI capability, was the decisive input. The AI is the execution layer. The operator is the intelligence layer.
1. Domain expertise was the decisive input — not AI capability.
The AI executed. The operator decided what the AI needed to know. DUoS timeband structure was five bands, not the three the model assumed — caught mid-build, corrected, logged as DEC-164. Settlement crystallisation windows: what constitutes confirmed vs provisional data changes signal reliability. A Jul/Aug 2024 MPAN anomaly contextualised against known market events the AI had no way to know. Without energy market knowledge, the intelligence layer would not have been intelligent.
2. Zero warm-up across 119 sessions.
Every session closed with a verbatim handover document — a complete start prompt for the next session. No re-explaining context. No drift. 119 consecutive sessions, full context loaded from the first message. This was the single most valuable process innovation across the entire build.
3. Every decision logged and immutable.
346 formally documented architectural decisions across 5 build streams. Each marked APPROVED, REVERSED, SUPERSEDED, or DEPRECATED. Nothing deleted. The append-only log is why the system is maintainable, not just delivered.