Houston, Texas · forward-deployed AI lead · founder @ MidnightDev

I build AI products—
and the systems that get them discovered, measured, and used.

I'm Alex Bouchard, a forward-deployed AI lead and AI-native founder-operator. At MidnightDev, I am the sole human accountable for every function and every production decision—from thesis, business model, brand, and UX through AI systems, full-stack engineering, testing, security, deployment, growth, analytics, and ongoing operations. Before software, I specialized in repositioning Class C shopping centers and contributed to ~90 shopping-center transactions totaling roughly $400 million.

~90

shopping centers · Class C repositioning

≈2 weeks

concept to App Store approval

72 hours

ReadableByAI · concept to production

work with MidnightDevinspect the work

Operating principle: Generate boldly. Validate cheaply. Kill ruthlessly. Scale what survives.

Featured work

Products that shipped—and the engineering evidence behind them.

The products are different by design. The case studies explain where the model helps, where it fails, and what the code keeps under control.

Dozen landing page with the headline Don't buy one influencer. Agents run a dozen, and a twelve-node campaign graph whose accept node is still running.

Dozen

Agent marketplace where the model cannot accept, post, or pay.

tanstack startinvariant testsclosed-loop agents
Yapword daily word game board mid-round, with the persistent generative character reacting to the player's guesses.

Yapword

Daily word game with a persistent generative character that reacts to real play.

reactgeminicapacitorweb + ios
That's My Best converting an uploaded photo-grid screenshot into a multiple-choice quiz about which friend picked which photo.

That's My Best

Multimodal social game that turns photo-grid screenshots into a friend quiz.

multimodal aimachine-checkable invariantsweb + ios
Yapoleon's Court gameplay screen showing the AI opponent's in-voice reply beside a favor meter the model cannot write to.

Yapoleon's Court

Competitive AI game where the model can't touch the score.

reactgeminivercel
AI Boardroom Forecast Audit diagram showing six synthetic decision lenses reviewing a $65.9M revenue forecast and flagging it as unsupported.

AI Boardroom Forecast Audit

Six synthetic decision lenses, one broken forecast, and a reproducible source-of-truth audit.

pythonmonte carloregressioninvariant tests
Casting matrix pairing each PrinciplesYou measurement with the council seat it produced — the Shaper least-like-Implementer archetype gap to FORGE, Organized 26 and Detail-Oriented 34 to FINISHER, Curious 95 crossed with Detail-Oriented 34 to RECON, Creative 94 and Feisty 91 to SPARRING, and Direct 94 crossed with Empathetic 41 to ENVOY — above the weighting formula, believability times confidence with a Laplace prior and 45-day half-life, and measured figures of 167 seconds and 14.7 cents per full council run with 62 passing tests and an outcome ledger not yet settled.

Caduceus

A five-seat AI decision council cast against a measured psychometric profile, with the strongest dissent published beside the recommendation.

pythonfour model familiesbelievability weightinghermes agent
Caliber concept diagram stamped concept, in design, 2026, showing three agent cards labeled doer, challenger, and finisher above calibration dials fed by a public-domain IPIP Big Five profile, with a note that the outcome ledger holds zero settled outcomes.

Caliber

Design-stage concept for a three-agent team calibrated to a person's measured psychometric gaps rather than generic roles.

design conceptipip big fivethree-agent teamoutcome ledger

Organic growth systems

I build the product. Then I engineer how it gets found.

A solo-built and operated portfolio across health research, real estate, legal information, local services, and consumer products. Every result below is organic—no paid acquisition.

BuyLandFL

↗

51,804 impressions · 198 clicks

92-day Search Console export

Transactional search and programmatic county-level geography.

Methylene Blue Ultra

↗

7,746 impressions · 100 clicks

28-day Search Console export

Research-led topical authority, comparisons, citations, and calculators.

Jones Act Calculator

↗

2,700 impressions · 23 clicks

28-day Search Console export

Tool-led legal discovery with public methodology and intent-specific pages.

Source: first-party Google Search Console exports supplied August 2, 2026. Impressions and clicks are visibility measures, not revenue claims.

01

Search architecture

Technical SEO, content taxonomies, internal-link systems, programmatic geography, structured data, and indexation controls.

02

AI-answer readiness

Entity clarity, source-qualified claims, extractable answers, citation surfaces, freshness signals, and answer-engine research.

03

Owned distribution

Editorial properties, App Store positioning, social character accounts, conversion paths, and PostHog telemetry that closes the loop.

PostHog in production

Instrument the decision—not merely the pageview.

The measurement system connects product behavior, acquisition, reliability, and release decisions across the operated portfolio.

  • Five active PostHog project spaces across the portfolio
  • Dozens of explicit product events spanning web and iOS
  • Activation funnels, weekly retention, share-loop and referral measurement
  • Session replay, rage-click diagnosis, fallback health, and release telemetry
inspect AI citation research ↗inspect the distribution system →operated social surface: @YapoleonGreater ↗

Reliability and safety

The model can generate content. It cannot own truth, scoring, safety, or spend.

Those boundaries appear in the apps and in small public reference systems for model fallback, content safety, and graph operations.

Gemini reliability proxy

Fallback chains, retry budgets, output limits, and denial-of-wallet protection.

↗

LLM safety gate

Fail-closed classification with quorum voting and per-item degradation.

↗

Graphiti + Neo4j operations

Health-driven recovery, safe backups, and local-only networking.

↗

Research and operating systems

Public research, reusable infrastructure, and commercial systems.

The portfolio extends beyond consumer AI: citation research, technical SEO tooling, independent invention work, and focused systems built around real commercial intent.

AI citation patterns

↗

A dated, source-qualified reference on how answer engines crawl, retrieve, and cite web content.

Midnight SEO skills

↗

An operational skill suite for audits, topical mapping, indexing, analytics, and search distribution.

Independent patent development

Completed a provisional patent application package for an independently developed invention, including the specification, prior-art review, examiner brief, and 26 claims, with critique from an Australian patent reviewer.

selected commercial systems

Owned properties that combine useful tools, disciplined information architecture, organic acquisition, and a defined conversion path.

ReadableByAI

↗

An AI-crawler visibility system taken from concept to production in 72 hours: active probes, customer-owned monitoring, log analysis, a 661-company benchmark, and a paid verification path.

Jones Act Calculator

↗

An interactive maritime claim-estimation and eligibility resource with public methodology and explicit legal disclaimers.

HTX Work Injury

↗

A Houston industrial-injury information system combining guided qualification, calculation, and public safety data.

HTX Permit Fix

↗

A local-service acquisition system built around urgent permitting intent, guided intake, and recurring organic inbound calls.

HTX Foundation Fix

↗

A concept-to-live specialized business scaffold built in two days: acquisition, diagnostic, operating, financing, and local-discovery systems—not claimed contractor history.

WordGameAI

↗

An editorial comparison and methodology property that routes qualified discovery into the Yapword product ecosystem.

From experiments to product rules

Each experiment changed what I was willing to let a model control.

Dec 2025

Six AI perspectives challenged one forecast

Used deliberately different roles to stress-test a real event model. They found optimistic revenue assumptions; a later audit found a second error in how the source data was defined.

Jan–Feb 2026

Persistent agents created new failure modes

Gave agents memory, follow-up schedules, and delegated tasks. The result was useful, but made ownership and human review more important—not less.

Mar 2026

A 21-role simulation exposed bad handoffs

Simulated a small company to see where product, engineering, legal, and growth teams lost context. The failures pointed to shared state, written decisions, and explicit owners.

Mid-2026

The lessons became product rules

In Yapword, That’s My Best, and Yapoleon’s Court, models generate character and content; people and deterministic code control scores, confirmed answers, safety, and spend.

Aug 2026

Accept, post, and pay stayed human-owned

Dozen is a marketplace graph for 1k–50k creators. The model drafts captions. Tests own the gates. Stripe Checkout is wired fail-closed; Connect transfers and live posting are still scaffolding — the case does not claim GMV.

Alex Bouchard, Forward-Deployed AI Lead and founder of MidnightDev, Houston, Texas.

Background

I did not take the usual route into AI.

Before MidnightDev, I specialized in repositioning Class C shopping centers and contributed to ~90 shopping-center transactions totaling roughly $400 million. I worked across acquisitions, dispositions, leasing, and portfolio strategy—finding underperforming retail assets, diagnosing the broken economics, and creating value through disciplined execution.

That experience is why I treat model output as evidence, not authority—and why I model the business, acquisition path, and downside before calling a build complete. In my products, people and deterministic code still control truth, scores, safety, and spend.

Contact

Have a product, growth, or operating problem worth attacking?

MidnightDev takes a limited number of consulting engagements, embedded product builds, and strategic partnerships. I am also open to unusually strong forward-deployed AI leadership, AI-native founder-operator, and special-projects roles.

alex@midnightdev.devHouston, Texas · willing to relocate
consulting services →