Building Planda, six months in: lessons from putting paper forms on rails

I thought the interesting work was going to be the AI. It hasn’t been.

It’s been the slow, frustrating, oddly tender work of making the existing process visible — talking to planners who have done this for thirty years, watching them click through systems that fight them, and writing down the unwritten rules.

Notes on what we got right, what we got embarrassingly wrong, and the kind of engineering that doesn’t really show up in a demo.