Case study
Jewel Bespoke Build
A family-run construction company in Surrey, building loft conversions, extensions and whole-house renovations across the South of England on sixty-five years of trade experience.
The building was never the problem. It was everything around it. The day on site arrived in the office as messages and photographs that somebody then had to turn into a report for the client. Drawings came back marked up. Valuations were assembled by hand. The person who knew where everything was could never be away on a Friday.
None of that is a software problem to begin with. It is a question about how work moves through a business, and it has to be answered on paper before anybody writes anything.
Visit Jewel Bespoke BuildThe idea
One decision per thing that arrives.
Everything that reaches the business is a communication: a photograph from site, a message, a marked-up drawing, an email. A person makes exactly one decision about each one — what it is. After that the system groups them, and the machine writes what has to be written from the group.
It is a small idea, and that is why it held. There is no form to fill in, no second system to keep up to date, and nothing that falls apart when a week is busy. The judgement stays with the person who has it; the typing goes to the machine.
The calendar
How the sixteen weeks actually went.
Week one
Discovery, on paper
A week with the people who actually do the work. What arrives at the business, who decides what about it, and what somebody then has to type out again.
Week two
Proving it in code
Enough of the idea built to find out whether it held up outside the meeting room. It did, and we stopped there rather than building on.
Three and a half weeks
The business decided
A pause while Jewel weighed it up. We did not build through it. Nothing was spent and nothing was wasted, which is the point of proving it first.
24 June 2026
Into production
The portal went live and the work moved onto it. From there it grew a piece at a time, each piece in use before the next was started.
28 August 2026
The pivot to a connector
The chat built into the portal came out and an MCP connector went in, so the business could reach its own work from the assistant it already used.
Where it got to
What Jewel run on today.
Jewel now run on a portal that shows every project at the stage it is really at, a request flow where a plain-English ask becomes a build they can watch, and a connection that lets their own Claude read a job or raise a request without opening the site.
That last part is why the chat we had built into the portal came out again in August. People do not want another window to go and look at. They already have an assistant open, so the work should be reachable from inside it — which is what a connector does, and what a chat box on a website never will.
- 1,032
- commits
- 79
- days with commits
- 41
- pull requests
- 221
- database migrations
- 85
- connector tools
- 11
- roles modelled
- ~170
- user stories
- 16 weeks
- May to September
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