sherifbutt.dev · cardiff, uk
—
$ whoami

Hi, I'm Sherif. I build AI tools that ship.

Founder & technical operator in Cardiff. A decade of full-stack, three years deep on AI systems — backend, frontend, ML pipelines, infra, end-to-end. Currently shipping TrueStage (live, profitable) and building Loyal Receptionist (a 24/7 AI receptionist for UK trades) alongside Loyalleads. Open to investor conversations and select studio engagements.

● loyalreceptionist · pilot truestage.co.uk · shipped · profitable loyalleads · studio
3
products shipped
10+
yrs full-stack
3
yrs on AI
1
studio

##now

updated september 2026
company
Loyalleads — websites for businesses. the limited company the other two trade under.
selling
Loyal Receptionist — 24/7 AI secretary. calls, SMS, WhatsApp, bookings.
selling
TrueStage — AI property staging. for UK estate agents.

##what i'm building

click to expand
shipping · paid
open-source
in validation
archived · with receipts
Aug 2026
The prompt I never wrote
None of the things I say when I want an image contain the word image. Getting an agent to notice that worked — and made everything downstream more expensive, harder to reproduce, and impossible to give up.
10 min
Jul 2026
I built a tool to find customer pain. Its best output was telling me I was wrong.
Reddit blocks AI crawlers, so I built an MCP plugin to get in. Then it spent three days proving me wrong — about my market, about my wedge, and finally about whether it should be a product at all.
11 min
Apr 2026
Using YOLO for CAPTCHA recognition — 17 phases from demo-ware to production
Quad-signal fusion, 7-layer motor control modelled on neuroscience papers, cost/accuracy tables. The naive approach works in the demo and breaks in the wild — this is the rebuild.
14 min
May 2026 · draft
The dark side of open source in the age of AI
AI collapsed the cost of replicating a SaaS from $500K to $500. That changes the open-source calculus — here's the math with Sentry / HashiCorp / Redis as the evidence.
~10 min
May 2026 · draft
Self-healing selectors: why V-Scrape rebuilds its own extraction logic
Cached LLM-derived extractors + drift detection. How to not pay for the same reasoning twice.
~7 min
Jun 2026 · draft
BYOK is a feature, not a cost centre
Why passing AI provider keys through to the user is the right default for power tools.
~5 min
Jun 2026 · draft
Benchmarking scrapers honestly — methodology behind ScrapeMe
What the 18 scenarios test, why 1,800 points, and how the 9-signal bot-detection score is computed.
~9 min
3 published · 5 drafts · updated monthly browse the full index →

##support the work

if something here helped

##contact

one url, one inbox
— [email protected]: ~/homepage —
➜ ~