Ed & Helen — Emit & Compound

AI that does things
your way, and keeps
doing them.

Ed & Helen helps owners of businesses that win work through quotes and proposals put AI on how they actually operate.

Not a smarter model. A small process, and software that holds it: your people's corrections land in one place, get approved once, and bind every tool and every seat from then on. Built in the open, on our own business first, so you can check the receipts before you trust the pitch.

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Seven things an owner asks before letting AI near a customer

We asked owners we know what they require of an AI platform and wrote down what came back. Every promise on this site answers one of these, in your words, with what runs today. Where the honest answer is "not yet," it says so.

"Will my people actually use it, and by when?"

The ledger app was built by describing it in one paragraph to the platform's own agent, plus one fix prompt, and the hosted rebuild cost nine cents. Your time to a working copy is one sign-in and one click on a Blueprint link; there is nothing to install. The setup and the hosting are ours, not yours.

"Does it talk to QuickBooks, the CRM, the inbox?"

The platform documents connectors for Google Workspace, Slack, GitHub, Notion, and any service that exposes an MCP server. QuickBooks, HubSpot, Salesforce, and Microsoft 365 are not wired yet. When one is, it will be shown here running, not promised.

"Does it sound like us, and does a correction stick?"

A correction made on a Tuesday is proposed to a shared ledger, approved in a ten-minute weekly review, and lands on a house-rules page every tool reads before it works. Your copy of the software is yours to change by asking for the change, and nobody updates it under you. This is the requirement Ed & Helen exists to answer.

"Can I trust it not to embarrass me?"

Anything with a side effect, sending an email, writing a row to a sheet, waits in a queue for a person. The tool keeps working against a simulated result until you say yes, and every action is logged. Inside the gadgets, approval is by design and by instruction: proposed, then approved, never assumed.

"Is our stuff safe, and do we keep it if we leave?"

Each gadget runs in its own sandbox with no standing credentials and no network access it was not handed. A copy carries code, never data. That was tested by making a second account and trying to read the first account's rows; nothing came back. Export is CSV and a portable gadget file today. Hosted copies live on our Cloudflare account, and a deletion path is not built yet.

"What's the number, will it stay the number, and what do I get back?"

On our instance the first hundred AI calls a day, per person, are free; past that you connect your own Cloudflare account and pay your own usage. There is no flat price yet and no payback figure yet. The first real numbers get published here when they exist, not before.

"Who do I call?"

David Hicks, at david@edandhelen.com. Not a vendor's support queue. Thirty years of building and selling systems, most recently as CTO of an AI company, and the person who set up everything on this site. /about

What owners bring

"We're a small company and AI feels overwhelming."
Where to start, what to skip, what's actually going to pay back in six months.
"We don't have a tech problem. We have an operations problem."
Sometimes that's where AI helps; sometimes it isn't. You'll get a straight answer.
"I'm not sure if this is even an AI problem."
Often it isn't. Most "tech" problems are people-and-incentives problems wearing a tech disguise.

What we're building right now

The practice

AI consulting for small and mid-sized businesses that win work through direct sales. Not strategy decks: running loops, left wired into how you actually operate. /work

Emit & Compound, built in the open

The institutional-memory pattern we run our own business on: every lesson an AI session learns becomes a rule every future session honors. The pattern doc, the kit, the gadgets, the logs, the mistakes, all public. /pattern

Writing

Essays and build logs from inside an AI-run business. What's working, what isn't, with the receipts. No tips, no listicles. /library

How this works

Email. Say what you're working on. We get on a call.

If it's something Ed & Helen can help with, a single conversation, a short project, a monthly retainer, an introduction, we figure out the shape that fits. If it isn't, you get pointed to someone better suited.

A small number of engagements at a time, so the work is real, not slideware.

david [at] edandhelen.com


See the engagement shapes directly