I'm a wedding venue owner who built a production AI platform without writing the code myself. Not because I was coasting on agents - because I wrote the spec so tightly that the code became the easy part.
Bloom is a venue intelligence platform now in active build across four tiers, with prompt versioning, dual-provider fallback, a four-character cross-tier audit framework, and a 2,700-line living architecture doctrine that gets fed to Claude Code at the start of every session. The doctrine isn't documentation. It's the spec, the test plan, the security policy, and the cost ceiling, all in one place, all under version control, all enforced by audit.
This talk is about what I've learned doing it: where doctrine-driven development actually works, where it falls apart, and what the real failure modes look like when the founder is the architect and the model is the contractor.
I'll walk through three specific findings from a recent audit - an AI name leak that was worse than the doctrine tracker indicated, an inquiry-date recomputation gap, and a cost ceiling enforcement hole — and what each one taught me about the limits of writing your way to correctness.
The audience leaves with a concrete framework for treating prompts as governed artifacts: versioned, audited, fallback-protected, and tied to enforceable cost and security boundaries. Useful Monday morning whether you're a non-engineer founder or an engineering lead trying to bring AI work under the same discipline as the rest of your stack.
Why me, why this audience:
I'm not pitching a product. I'm an operator with a build I can show, in a category - vertical AI for a regulated, relationship-heavy industry - that the DC audience will recognize structurally even if the surface domain is unfamiliar. Wedding venues aren't federal agencies, but the constraints rhyme: irreplaceable transactions, low tolerance for AI failure modes, real money on the line, and no appetite for "the model hallucinated" as an answer.
I live in Rixeyville, Virginia. Inside the 100-mile radius.