About Magic Ship

Why the shop exists

Most AI work fails in the same unglamorous places: the knowledge is scattered and unretrievable, the codebase resists automation, the evaluation story is guesswork, and the team inherits a system nobody can maintain. We work on those places. Sometimes that means building the product. Sometimes it means going in as a forward-deployed engineer on someone else's product. Sometimes it means training the team and leaving.

We ship, then we hand over the keys.

Magic Staff

The crew that does the work.

One person does the work, in Vancouver. The character sheet - printed name, role, classes, portrait - goes up when the portrait does, and not before: this shop will not put a stock avatar, an invented second engineer, or a team of N on a page. What follows is the map of the work instead.

Classes aboard

Six classes, one per service line plus delivery. They describe the work, not the headcount.

• ShipwrightBuilds the vessel - tools, data model, interface, evals - and launches it.AI products, built end to end
• ArchivistTurns scattered company knowledge into something a model can answer from, with citations.Knowledge bases and retrieval
• CartographerMaps and refits an existing codebase so agents and humans both move fast in it.Codebase and team optimization
• HeraldTeaches the crew: working sessions, written material, habits that outlast the engagement.Training and enablement
• SignallerEmbeds in the client's stack and builds the integrations a catalog cannot cover.Forward-deployed engineering
• NavigatorReads the chart first: what to build, in what order, what to skip.Cross-cutting scoping and delivery

How we work

• scope before codeA call, then a written scope: what gets built, in what order, and what we are deliberately skipping.
• a slice, not a demoA thin end-to-end slice in week one, then weekly increments against acceptance criteria fixed before the week starts.
• hand over the keysTests, an eval suite that tells you when a change made it worse, and documentation that lets your team take it over. Checked into your repo, not into a slide deck.
• numbers we can defendA figure ships only when it survives "measured how?" in a sales call. Anything else stays unpublished, which is why the work index is currently empty.
• say no earlyIf this is not the right shop for your problem, you hear it in the first reply rather than eight weeks in.

The tools those principles run on are listed in full on the stack, including where each one is the wrong choice. The engagement writeups are not published yet, and the work index says why.

Where we are

Vancouver, British Columbia. The work is remote-first and the clients are wherever they are: no branch offices, no local numbers, no claimed presence in a city we have never worked from.Every market we work in is listed, and all of it runs from one desk here.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."