I'm Long.
I build AI software
that actually ships
Solo founder of RDTS. Nearly a decade writing production software — started in 2018, before Midjourney existed and well before LLMs could ship usable code. Spent the agency years as the in-house dev ops leads called when their no-code stack stopped scaling. Went solo to build the software those teams actually needed.
I started writing software for a living in 2018 — before Midjourney existed, before ChatGPT existed, before LLMs could write usable code. I came up traditional: real backends, real frontends, real databases, no AI lifting the keyboard for me. By the time the first useful LLMs landed in 2022 I had four years of production-grade code under my belt and a very clear sense of what AI was good for and what it wasn't.
I spent those early years as the in-house web developer at two marketing agencies — first as a junior, then as the engineer the founder went to when something had to actually work. Both shops sold creative work as the headline product. Both quietly depended on whatever automation glue I could rig up to make the operational side stay standing.
The pattern was the same at both. A content lead would buy Zapier. They'd build something brilliant. Around month three, the bill would spike. By month four, they'd be exporting CSVs to make the data move the way they needed. By month six, I'd get a Slack: "is there a way to make this less broken?" By month nine, we'd be running Code by Zapier nodes that should have been a small Node.js service.
Eventually I figured out that the wall those teams kept hitting wasn't a Zapier problem. It was the same wall any no-code tool builds in front of you the moment your work has actual logic in it. Custom branching. Real database joins. Cost predictability. Multi-step AI calls. Anything that needs to behave correctly under pressure.
That wall has a door in it, and the door is custom code. Not a 12-month enterprise build. A two-week, one-engineer build that solves the specific bottleneck and ships with the source code in your repo.
That's RDTS. It's me, working solo, charging fixed prices, building real software for content teams that outgrew their no-code stack. Talk to the duck if you want to hear what that looks like for your specific problem.
No-code is great until it isn't.
Zapier and n8n are the right tools for a real range of jobs. The pitch isn't "no-code is bad." It's "you graduated, here's what comes next."
Source code transfers to you.
I don't build "your software, hosted by us." I build your software, deployed wherever you want, with the repo in your hands. Take it anywhere later.
Pricing is a feature.
You should know what something costs before you book a call. The three tiers are visible on every page for a reason.
Solo, on purpose.
No agency layer between you and the engineer. The person you talk to first is the person writing your code. That's the entire point.
Specific over generic.
I tell you which Anthropic model I'd use, which database, which deployment target — and why. You hire me for opinions, not vibes.
Honest no-list.
There's work I'm wrong for. Mobile apps, ML training, equity-only deals. I'll refer you out instead of taking the job and disappointing you.
Real builds.
Not lorem ipsum.
The clearest signal of "is this person actually a working engineer?" is real software with real users. Three projects worth pointing at:
ClipMango
solo · ongoingAI music video pipeline. Multi-model orchestration across Claude (lyric understanding), OpenAI (generation), and Seedance (video). Production-grade lip-sync, beat-detection, shot-by-shot prompt engineering. Strongest demo of what's actually possible end-to-end.
Lee De Card
lead dev · 2024AI-driven creator booking platform. Calendar integration, automated outreach, intake workflows. Built on a small team where I owned the engineering side end-to-end.
Dragon Wagons
site + tooling · 2024Marketing site + content automation backend. The kind of "we need a real engineer for the ops layer behind our public-facing site" project that's a textbook RDTS engagement.
Easiest way
is to talk.
Free 5-minute conversation with the duck — the custom AI scoping agent I built — or with me directly. Tell me what you're trying to build and you'll leave with a scoped tier and a fixed price.