ThinkNext / About

// About

A small team building the AI tools we wish existed.

ThinkNext Software Solutions is an AI-augmented engineering and staffing firm. We build software with AI at every step, ship the tools we use as open source, and meet teams where they already work. Cascade is our flagship. Relay is its autonomous cousin. Our services pay for the OSS time.

// Our story

We started ThinkNext because most consulting firms are still pretending AI is not happening.

AI is changing how software gets built. Every engagement we take involves AI at multiple steps: requirements extraction, code generation, code review, testing, documentation. We are not hiding it. We are showing you how to do the same.

The pattern we kept hitting on past projects: the gap between "the team talked about it" and "the code shipped" is wider than anyone admits. Information leaks at every handoff. Cascade exists because we got tired of being on the leaky end of that game. Relay exists because once you can ship code from requirements, you can also ship code from a labeled ticket.

We are a small team, deliberately. We take a small number of engagements at a time, and we do them with AI leverage at every step. Our services pay the bills; our open-source projects compound the brand. When the OSS work hits a quality bar, the services pipeline takes care of itself.

// How we work

Four principles, applied to every engagement.

We use AI at every step. We dogfood our own tools. We ship the work as open source whenever we can. We tell you what we did and why.

01

AI at every step, not just code

Most AI consultancies use AI for code generation and call it a day. We use it for requirements extraction (Cascade ingests meeting recordings), for code review (every PR has agent-generated and human-validated review), for testing (test cases written alongside features), and for documentation. AI is a multiplier across the whole SDLC, not a code-completion plugin.

02

Your stack, your infrastructure, your keys

We do not force our tools or our LLM provider on you. Cascade supports 5 LLM providers and 4 VCS systems for a reason. If your company has Claude approved, we use Claude. If you only have OpenAI, we use OpenAI. If you cannot send code to any SaaS, we run Ollama locally. The work fits your constraints, not the other way around.

03

Open by default, billable by exception

Generic tooling we build for clients gets open-sourced under MIT (with your blessing) so it benefits the broader community. Client-specific logic stays proprietary. This is how Cascade and Relay exist: they started as recurring patterns across multiple engagements that deserved to live somewhere reusable. Net-net you pay less because we are not rebuilding the same harness for every project.

04

Auditable, every step

Every commit Cascade makes is attributable to a story. Every story is attributable to a meeting, ticket, or prompt. Every LLM call surfaces its cost. You can run git log and see exactly which decisions the agent made and why. We do not believe in opaque black-box automation, even when we are the ones operating it.

// What we believe

AI should make engineers more senior, not redundant.

The next decade of software is being written right now, by engineers who know how to leverage AI well. Not by AI alone, and not by engineers pretending AI isn't happening. We are betting our company on the position that the engineers who pair tightly with AI are 2x to 5x more effective than they were two years ago, and that the gap is widening.

We are also betting that the teams who keep humans in the loop at every meaningful gate produce better outcomes than the teams who chase fully autonomous AI. Approval is cheap. Recovery from a bad merge is expensive. Our tools are built for that asymmetry.

If those bets are wrong, we will say so publicly and adjust. If they are right, we want to be the people you call when you need to ship.

Have a project that needs senior eyes and AI leverage?

We respond within one business day. Fixed-price proposals in 48 hours. No discovery sessions, no 6-week sales cycles.