Most "build me an AI thing" briefs I get fall into one of two buckets. About 60% of them are real, scoped, shippable in a weekend. The other 40% are open-ended research projects dressed up as engineering tasks, and the only honest answer is no, not for a flat fee, not in four hours, probably not ever in the shape you described .

The skill people pay for isn't the build. The skill is being able to look at a brief and say which bucket it's in within ten minutes.

Here's how I do it, what I'll actually scope for a fixed $649 price, and the ones I send back with a "this isn't ready yet" note.

The five questions I ask before I scope anything

Before I even look at the use case, I run the brief through five filters. If it fails any of them, the project either gets re-scoped, downgraded to a strategy session, or refused.

Is the success criterion falsifiable? "Make the AI write better emails" is not a criterion. "Reduce the time I spend writing prospect outreach from 2 hours/day to under 20 minutes" is.…