A Thorough Accounting of Time, Part 3

Three months. The first month was research, validation, and foundation. The second was outreach, taxes, and sharpening the direction. This month, the builder is back. February is when the product starts to take shape beyond a skeleton -- real features, real intelligence, real utility.

The conversations from January crystallized what the first set of features needed to be. Marine construction compliance is a world of dense forms, regulatory ambiguity, and institutional knowledge locked in the heads of people who have been doing this for decades. The opportunity isn't to replace that expertise -- it's to make it accessible, searchable, and faster to apply. That means building tools that understand the domain: a RAG system to surface relevant regulations, a chat assistant to guide users through compliance questions, and a validator to catch problems in USACE applications before they get rejected.

Overview

Twelve weeks in. The first half of February is about refreshing the public face of the company, and the second half is a focused sprint on the AI-assisted compliance tools that will form the core of the MVP. The landing page gets an overhaul, and then I go heads down on building the intelligence layer.

Receipts

Week 10: 2/2 - 2/8

The landing page has been live since late December, but it's been largely untouched since launch. The copy was written in a rush, the design was functional but not compelling, and it doesn't reflect what I've learned from a month of customer conversations. This week I focus on updating the marketing site.

I rework the messaging to speak more directly to the pain points I've heard from actual marine construction professionals. Less about the technology, more about the outcomes: faster permit turnaround, fewer rejections, less time fighting with forms. The visual design gets some attention too -- not a full redesign, but enough polish to feel legitimate when I send the URL to a new contact. I want the site to look like it comes from someone who takes this seriously, not a weekend side project.

By the end of the week, the updated site is pushed through CI/CD and live on production. It's better. Not perfect, but better, and I can iterate.

Week 11: 2/9 - 2/15

A transitional week. I'm wrapping up the marketing updates and starting to scope the next phase of product work. The customer conversations from January made it clear that the highest-leverage first feature is something that helps with the USACE application process. These applications are notoriously complex -- dozens of pages, cross-references to federal and state regulations, attachments and exhibits, and a high rejection rate for applications that miss requirements.

I start planning the architecture for three interconnected tools: a RAG system for regulatory knowledge retrieval, a conversational assistant for guided compliance Q&A, and a validation engine for USACE applications. The idea is that these three pieces work together -- the RAG provides the knowledge base, the assistant makes it accessible, and the validator applies it proactively.

Week 12: 2/16 - 2/22

Heads down building. The RAG system comes first -- I need a way to ingest, chunk, and retrieve relevant sections from the massive corpus of USACE regulations, guidance documents, and engineering circulars. The volume of material is enormous, but the structure is surprisingly consistent once you understand how the Corps organizes their documentation. I build out the ingestion pipeline, experiment with chunking strategies, and get to a point where I can query against the regulatory corpus and get relevant, contextual results.

With the RAG foundation in place, the chat assistant comes next. This isn't a generic chatbot -- it's a domain-specific conversational interface that understands the context of marine construction permitting. When a user asks about Section 404 requirements for a bulkhead replacement, the assistant should be able to pull the relevant regulatory language, explain the practical implications, and point to the specific forms and exhibits needed. The first iteration is rough, but the retrieval quality is promising.

Week 13: 2/23 - 2/28

The USACE application validator is the capstone of the month's work. This is the feature that could deliver the most immediate value -- a tool that takes a draft USACE permit application and checks it against known requirements, flagging missing information, inconsistencies, and common rejection triggers before the application is submitted.

I build the validator to work against the most common application types: Section 10 and Section 404 permits. It cross-references the application fields against the regulatory requirements surfaced by the RAG system, checking for completeness and consistency. The first version catches obvious gaps -- missing coordinates, incomplete project descriptions, missing environmental impact sections -- and I can already see the path to more sophisticated validation as the RAG corpus grows.

By the end of February, the three pieces are working together as a prototype. It's not production-ready -- the RAG needs more documents, the assistant needs refinement, and the validator needs to handle more application types -- but the core loop is functional: ask a question, get regulatory context, validate your work. For two weeks of focused building, this feels like real progress.

The MVP deadline I set for myself was 2/28. I'm not there yet in terms of a shippable product, but the intelligence layer is working, and that's the hardest part. March will be about wrapping the UI around these tools and getting them in front of customers.