01
Measure what gets built
Every engagement ends with an evaluation harness in your repository. Without a number, neither of me can tell whether the next change helped.
About
Named after the red pen
Rubra is Latin for red, the colour of the pen that marks what is wrong. A good share of the value here is telling clients which parts of their plan will not work, early enough that the finding is still cheap.
This is a one-person consultancy, and that is a deliberate choice rather than a stage on the way to something larger. It means two or three engagements at a time, and it means the person who quotes the work is the person who does it.
The reason it exists is narrow and fairly boring. Capable engineering teams keep building LLM prototypes that never reach production, while large consultancies bill considerable sums for slide decks about AI transformation. What sits between the two is someone who has already crossed the distance from a working demo to a system that holds up under real users, real documents and real scrutiny.
Work runs remotely across eu and uk hours in full, with afternoons overlapping us eastern and central, with on-site workshops at the points where being in the room matters.
How I work
Six things I hold to
Not values on a wall. Each one costs money in a predictable way, which is how you can tell they are meant.
02
Say when not to build it
Some discovery engagements end with a recommendation against the flagship use case. That is not a failed engagement. It is the cheapest possible version of finding out.
03
Handover is the deliverable
No managed services. A consultant who depends on running your system has the wrong incentives when designing it.
04
No vendor money
No reseller agreements, no referral fees, no partner tiers. It matters because the recommendation is often to use less software rather than more.
05
Regulation is engineering
Article 15 wants accuracy testing. Article 12 wants logging. Someone has to instrument the system, and it should be the person who built it.
06
Boring beats clever
The simplest architecture that meets the requirement. Most systems marketed as agentic are better served by a workflow, and I will say so.
Who
Who you will be working with
Your Name
Independent AI consultant
[Placeholder biography. Replace this with your background: where you worked before, the systems you have shipped, and the problems you are unusually good at. Be specific. For a one-person consultancy this section does more work than anything else on the site.]
Frequently asked questions
Is Rubra Digital one person?
Yes. That is deliberate rather than a stage on the way to something larger. You work with the person who scopes, builds and hands over the system, and estimates come from someone who has seen your data. For work that genuinely needs more hands I bring in specialists I have worked with before, named as contractors rather than presented as staff.
What happens if you are unavailable mid-engagement?
It is the fair question to ask a sole practitioner. Everything lives in your repository from the first commit: code, evaluation harness, architecture decision records and runbook. There is no knowledge held only in my head, and no dependency that would leave you unable to continue. Engagement terms cover what happens to fees if a project has to pause.
Why hire a specialist rather than a large consultancy?
For a broad transformation programme, you probably should not. That is what large firms are built for. Hire a specialist when the problem is specific and technical: retrieval quality that is not good enough, an evaluation practice that does not exist, a system that works in a demo and not in production, or an AI Act classification you need to defend.
What if we are not sure what we need?
That is the normal starting position, and it is what discovery is for. Start with a 30-minute call. I will tell you whether a discovery engagement is worth the money or whether you already know enough to go straight to a build.
Get a straight answer on your AI roadmap
A 30-minute call with the engineer who would do the work, not a salesperson. You will get an honest read on what is worth building, what is not, and roughly what it costs.
No NDA needed to talk. EU and UK hours in full, with afternoons overlapping US Eastern and Central.