Method notes3 min read
When the buyer asks an AI instead of a search engine
Industrial buyers are starting to ask assistants, not search boxes. What that changes for a supplier's website, what it does not, and what we did to ours.
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Notes from an undercounted industry
Original research, method notes and engineering notes from building Kabaido. Every number carries its confidence grade.
Industry research
Original sizing of a workforce no occupation code captures, every figure graded.
Industry research2 min read
You cannot hire your way out of a quoting backlog
The UK posts about 900 new application engineer adverts a month against a 27,200 base. What continuous re-hiring of a hard-to-define role really signals.
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Where £1.36bn of quoting capacity sits
UK application engineer pay barely varies by domain, so headcount is the whole map. Three domains hold 41.7% of it. A tour of a top-heavy market.
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The job title the labour market cannot see
Around 27,200 people in the UK do a job that official statistics cannot find. Here is what happens when a role spreads across sixteen occupation codes.
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What an application engineer's day actually holds, and where the orders gate.
Inside the work3 min read
How to specify an industrial machine knife
A machine knife order is three dimensions, a steel, a hardness and an edge. Most enquiries carry four of the six. Here is the full specification.
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What an RFQ actually contains
An RFQ looks like a document. It is closer to a scattered set of claims, each hiding somewhere else. How engineers read one, and how software should.
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Five tasks gate every industrial order
An application engineer's week holds fifteen different jobs. Follow the orders instead of the diary and it collapses to five, all of them specification.
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How we measure what nobody counts, and the rules that keep the numbers honest.
Method notes3 min read
Choosing a bandsaw blade in three questions
A bandsaw catalogue runs to hundreds of variants. The choice comes down to three questions and one rule about teeth. Here is the published maths.
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How to measure a market nobody counts
No occupation code, no analyst report, no number to borrow. How we sized the UK application engineer market by triangulation, and kept it honest.
Read the postEngineering notes
Decisions from building Kabaido, from grounding a model to counting in pence.
Engineering notes3 min read
What a plasma cut chart actually encodes
A clean plasma part and an evening of grinding dross differ by three numbers per material and thickness. Where they come from and why they drift.
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What a balustrade quote has to calculate
A metre of balustrade looks like a price per metre. It is a structure with a load case, and the load case moves the price. The working, in order.
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The soft jaw order hiding in a chuck model
A soft jaw enquiry looks like two words and a chuck size. The serration, the jaw envelope and the material are all implied. How a seller reads one.
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Teaching software to read like a domain engineer
A general AI model knows what a milling cutter is. It does not know your milling cutter. What it takes to ground a model in a real industrial domain.
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Why quoting software should count in pence
Binary floating point cannot hold a tidy decimal exactly. Charming in a tutorial, less so on a 4,000-line quote. A short defence of integer money.
Read the postSee the work these notes come from
Kabaido turns RFQs, POs and service requests into structured, cited, priced responses. Test it with a real one.