Dávid Szemán Quality leadership, applied to AI adoption

The work

What I built, what it was for, and what each one actually proves

Grouped by what they really are: systems I designed and built myself, work built inside a paid client engagement, and operating practices. Each entry states its own status and its limits. Client and product names stay confidential; the figures given are ones I can state accurately without disclosing anything sensitive.

Built

Systems I designed and built end to end, and then had to make actually work. These are my own builds and prototypes — each states its status and what it does not prove.

Vision-to-catalogue extraction pipeline

2026

Photograph a physical item, get back the verified catalogue record.

  • Text recognition → candidate retrieval → ranking → eligibility rules → structured response
  • 190 items catalogued through it
  • Failed 6 of 7 real-world photographs on first contact; 5 root causes found and fixed
  • 30-item reference set, measured at top-1 and top-5 — 30/30 after fixes, zero regressions
  • Limitation, stated plainly: that set stayed green while the seven real photographs failed. It is a regression net, not a release evaluation
  • 50 automated tests, duplicate protection, rate limiting, security hardening
  • One case left deliberately failing: the record does not exist in the source catalogue

Four of the five fixes were not AI fixes. Most "the model is bad" turns out to be input handling, retrieval and business logic.

  • n8n
  • Vision LLM
  • Cloudflare D1
  • TypeScript
Full case: When six of seven runs failed →

Designed, built, evaluated, operated

AI use-case decision-support platform

2026

Decision-support software for choosing which AI use cases an organisation should fund and ship.

  • Status: personal prototype. Built solo to model enterprise decision processes; never deployed inside an enterprise programme
  • L0–L5 maturity model plus an 11-dimension AI operating profile layered on top
  • 11-gate use-case lifecycle, from intake to production approval
  • Use-case dossier carrying residual risk as an indication, never a verdict
  • Evaluation and pilot-evidence layer feeding the gates
  • Portfolio prioritisation with visible, movable weights — never a black-box score
  • Vendor assessment as its own entity, deliberately unscored (a single number would fake precision)
  • Adoption and realised-value tracking: plan versus actual variance, not judgement
  • Around ten design decisions documented with the alternative rejected

The design principle throughout: the system never decides. It makes visible what you are risking.

  • React
  • TypeScript
  • Zustand
Full case: Escaping POC hell →

Designed and built solo

Executive AI governance dashboard

2026

An interactive briefing surface that makes an AI mandate legible to a leadership audience.

  • Status: self-built briefing artefact using public and illustrative data. It has not been used in a client governance engagement
  • Mandate gauge, value KPIs and a maturity view on one screen
  • Filterable, sortable, expandable book of work
  • An explicit RPA-versus-AI frame: when each is the right instrument
  • Governance gates and a first-90-days plan
  • Public and illustrative data marked distinctly, so nothing is passed off as verified
  • Self-contained, works offline, light and dark

Half of consulting is translation. This shows how I structure an executive AI briefing — what leadership is asked to decide, and on what evidence.

  • HTML
  • CSS
  • Vanilla JS

Designed and built

A personal AI operating system

2026

The infrastructure I run my own work on: memory, tickets, sync, budget rules, generated views.

  • A written memory policy: what is stored, where, and what is never stored
  • Canonical source of truth separated from a generated human-readable view
  • Idempotent generators, so three machines cannot fight over the output
  • Silent git synchronisation across a Mac and two Windows machines
  • Markdown ticket system with a CLI and a generated board — decisions survive the session
  • Custom agent skills that enforce the working rules automatically
  • Enforced cost discipline: exploratory fan-out requires stated scale and approval

At personal scale this exercises controls that also matter in enterprise AI operations — provenance, a single source of truth, auditability, reproducibility, cost policy. It does not demonstrate enterprise security, availability, access control or organisational adoption.

  • Node.js (zero-dependency)
  • Git
  • Claude Code skills
Full case: Escaping POC hell →

Designed and built

Prompt evaluation harness

2026

A test bench that scores competing prompt versions instead of arguing about them.

  • Three summarisation prompt variants compared on the same inputs
  • Assertion-based checks plus LLM-rubric scoring, where a second model grades the output
  • Non-English test corpus, because quality claims rarely survive translation
  • Provider configuration so the same suite runs across models

Prompt quality is testable. This harness turns prompt comparison into a repeatable, versioned test instead of an ad hoc chat session.

  • promptfoo
  • LLM APIs
  • Python

Designed and built

Image classification for a small retail business

2026

A phone-first tool that sorts incoming second-hand stock into categories from photographs.

  • Status: working demo, live behind basic authentication and given to the customer at no charge — not a paid production deployment
  • A three-category contract agreed with the customer before any model work
  • Mobile-first web app; the vision-model call runs through a serverless proxy so the key never reaches the browser
  • Roughly 2.5–3 HUF per image at the current model, on a deliberately capped key
  • The decisive question was commercial, not technical: metered API plus engineering, or a flat subscription with a person in the loop
  • At their volume the subscription came out ahead — cheaper, simpler, and it degrades gracefully when the shop is busy
  • Awaiting the customer decision. Dedicated API billing, authentication and accuracy tuning are scoped but not built

An advisor who cannot recommend the boring answer is not much of an advisor.

Designed and built solo; delivered as a working demo for customer evaluation

A native iOS app, built with AI

2026

A planning app for people with ADHD — currently in testing, and deliberately without an AI feature.

  • Native SwiftUI, local-first, no account and no backend
  • Third full design revision, driven by real use rather than opinion
  • Calendar synchronisation, notifications, recurring schedules
  • An obvious AI feature — automatic task breakdown — sits on an explicit "not doing this" list
  • The reason is recorded: generating more items of variable quality is the worst thing you can do to an overwhelmed user

Knowing where AI does not belong in your own product is the same skill as knowing where it does not belong in someone’s business process.

  • SwiftUI
  • iOS 17+
  • EventKit

Specification, architecture, review — AI writes the code

Built inside a paid engagement

Work done inside a client engagement rather than on my own time. Each entry says what is known about its use — and, where I handed it over and left, what is not.

Offline certification framework with LLM-generated content

2026

Desktop exam software, plus 650 bilingual assessment items generated and validated by language models.

  • Timed, randomised exams with CSV results and PDF certificates
  • Encrypted question banks (AES-256-GCM, scrypt KDF) so items cannot be read off disk
  • 650 items across two languages, derived from existing structured test material
  • Quality enforced as rules: scenario constraint, answer-length ratio, distractor plausibility
  • Dual-perspective automated validation — candidate view and examiner view in one pass
  • Repair split by failure type: mechanical errors fixed in code, semantic errors by agent
  • Throughput, not quality evidence: no item was hand-edited, because the rules did the correcting
  • Limitation: validation was automated. No calibrated human audit was run, so this demonstrates scalable generation and automated screening — not independently verified assessment accuracy
  • Handed over when I left, at my manager's request. I have no data on how many people sat it afterwards, and I am not going to estimate — what I can claim is the build and the generation system, not the adoption

Two distinct capabilities in one project: AI as the tool that built the software, and AI as the engine producing what it runs on.

Designed and built with AI as development partner; designed the generation and validation system

Daily LLM reporting pipeline, in production

2025–2026

Test metrics, stakeholder summaries and risk reports generated every morning from live delivery data.

  • Ran from 2025 until I left in March 2026, producing both daily and weekly reports
  • Read by roughly ten managers and directors on the client side, alongside the delivery leads
  • Pulled results, defect status and coverage from the delivery tooling
  • Replaced manual report-writing cycles by senior leads
  • Prompt engineering tuned for repeatable structured output
  • Schema validation ran automatically on every generation. Content review stayed human — mine, because I was the one sending them out
  • Around 5% of generations needed a correction before they went out
  • Same shape of report every morning, so a change in the numbers means a change in reality
  • Built inside a confidential client engagement — client and product are not named

The stated problem was speed. The real one was consistency — and naming that correctly is what made it worth building.

Self-initiated — nobody asked for it

Operating practice

The habits underneath the projects. Less visible, and the reason the projects hold up.

Production workflow automations

2025–2026

Language models wired into real systems, with the failure handling that makes them survivable.

  • Webhook in, catalogue and database lookups in the middle, structured output back out
  • Schema validation, retries, rate-limit handling, duplicate protection
  • Behavioural verification: invoke it and read the execution output, because stored configuration can disagree with what actually ran

The model is rarely the hard part. What happens when it returns nothing is.

  • n8n
  • Webhooks
  • LLM APIs

Designed, built, operated

Cross-vendor context consolidation

2026

Pulled my own scattered AI memory out of three vendors and into a store I control.

  • Extracted from three separate assistant memories, including via computer-use automation
  • Every imported statement carries source, import date and status: confirmed, tool-claimed, outdated or contradictory
  • One file per topic, cross-linked, in plain text readable without the tool that produced it
  • Hard rules: no secrets ever, sensitive personal data only by explicit decision

A machine-generated summary of you is not automatically true. Provenance is the difference between context and folklore.

  • Markdown vault
  • Computer-use automation
  • Git

Designed and executed

Cross-model critique as a standing rule

2025–2026

Anything consequential gets argued against by a different model before I act on it.

  • An idea produced by one model is a hypothesis, not a finding
  • The instruction is "argue against this", not "check this"
  • Different vendors, because different training means different blind spots
  • It catches the dangerous failure: a plan that is coherent in every paragraph and built on an unchecked premise

Confidence is the one thing these systems supply for free. A second opinion is the cheapest correction available.

  • Multi-vendor LLMs

Working rule, enforced in my own tooling

Getting from zero to a defensible briefing

2026

A repeatable method for learning an unfamiliar industry fast without fooling myself.

  • A structured document, not a chat log — every claim carries source and confidence
  • Jargon explained inline the first time it appears; if I cannot write the explanation, I have not understood it
  • Verifiable fact separated from inference, contradictions marked rather than smoothed over
  • Ends with the questions the research could not answer

A fluent summary of a field you do not know is indistinguishable from an accurate one. The method exists to keep those apart.

  • Multi-vendor LLMs
  • Web research

Designed and used

Guardrails that stop an AI overclaiming

2026

Constraint systems that make it structurally hard for a model to say something untrue on your behalf.

  • An enumerated list of claims that may never be made — not implied, written down
  • Mandatory provenance: a statement that cannot be traced to a source does not get made
  • A defined way to say "we do not know", because without one the system will invent
  • Established fact kept visibly separate from inference
  • Applied to this site too: employers’ clients are never named, and what I have not done is on the About page

These controls reduce risk wherever generated output feeds a downstream decision — the failure mode being that a system says something false, fluently, in your name.

  • Prompt architecture
  • Policy files

Designed and applied across my own systems

Self-hosted infrastructure

2024–2026

A home server carrying automation and media services, kept in sync with two other machines.

  • Linux node running home automation, media services and scheduled jobs
  • Deliberate boundary about what data may leave the network, decided in advance
  • Everything generated must be reproducible from its source, or two machines eventually disagree

Small-scale data governance, with the same questions an enterprise asks: which copy is authoritative, and what is allowed to leave.

  • Linux
  • Home Assistant
  • Docker

Built and operated

If you want the reasoning

How I decide what is worth building

All of it came out of the same five questions — where the real bottleneck is, whether AI is the right instrument, what the process should look like, how we prove it works, and what has to exist for it to survive past the pilot.

Read the method →