We built Field in fourteen weeks. Here's what that actually meant.
Fourteen weeks ago I said yes to a project that should have required a team of four and six months. Here's what that actually looked like, and why it matters for the businesses we're building for.
Fourteen weeks ago I said yes to a project that should have required a team of four and six months.
I want to be honest about that sentence, because it's easy to read it as startup bravado, the kind of thing founders say to sound impressive. It's not meant that way. It's meant as the framing for a story about what software development is starting to look like, and why we think it matters for the businesses we're building for.
What Field is
Field is a field service management platform for the trades, HVAC companies, plumbers, electricians, the businesses that fix your pipes, wire your buildings, and keep your equipment running. Dispatchers use it to assign jobs, track technicians, and manage inventory. Technicians use a mobile app to see their schedule, start and complete jobs, record parts, and add notes ,even when they have no signal.
It's not a new idea. Field service management software exists. But the existing options mostly fall into two categories: too simple to actually run a business on, or enterprise platforms with enterprise pricing and enterprise complexity. The gap focused, professional software at a price a ten-person HVAC company can afford, is where Field lives.
The addressable market for field service management is large. More importantly, the people in it are underserved. The businesses that keep your city running deserve software that works as hard as they do.
How we built it
The fourteen weeks figure needs context.
Field is a multi-tenant SaaS platform. It has a .NET 9 API with clean architecture, domain-driven design, a full authentication layer via Microsoft Entra External ID, a React frontend with a real-time dispatch board, a mobile technician PWA that works offline, invoicing with PDF generation, inventory management, client management, and 617 automated tests. It is not a prototype or a minimum viable product in the sense of "we cut everything interesting." It is a real system.
That system was built by one developer —> me <— working evenings and weekends around a full-time job.
The reason this was possible in fourteen weeks rather than fourteen months is straightforward: I used an AI assistant as a genuine development partner. Not for autocomplete. Not to generate code I didn't understand. As a thinking partner, something to design the architecture with, work through domain modeling with, diagnose infrastructure problems with, and hold the full context of a complex codebase simultaneously while I worked on any specific part of it.
I want to be precise about what that means because it's easy to misunderstand.
The AI didn't build Field. I made every architectural decision. I designed the domain model. I wrote a substantial portion of the code directly. Every piece of generated code was reviewed against the requirements and verified to work correctly before it went in. The 617 tests in the test suite were written to verify specific behaviors that I specified.
What changed was the pace of generation and the quality of the thinking. When you have a capable, patient, contextually aware partner available at every moment of the work — something that never gets tired, never has a meeting to get to, and can hold the entire system in mind while discussing a single component ,the work goes faster and the decisions get better. Not because the tool is doing your thinking. Because thinking out loud into a responsive space is better than thinking in silence.
The judgment is still yours. The domain knowledge is still yours. The accountability is still yours. The tool multiplies what you can do with those things. It doesn't replace them.
Why this matters for the people we're building for
The honest reason I built Field this way isn't because I was trying to prove a point about AI development. It's because I was one person with a real business problem to solve and a realistic amount of time to solve it.
That constraint, limited time, limited resources, needing to build something that actually works, is exactly the constraint facing every small field service business we're building for. The owner of a ten-person HVAC company doesn't have an enterprise IT budget. They don't have a team to evaluate software vendors. They need something that works, that they can learn quickly, and that costs what a small business can actually afford.
The way Field was built is a reflection of the values baked into what Field is: focused, pragmatic, built to do the job rather than to look impressive doing it.
What's next
Field is in soft beta. We're onboarding a small group of field service businesses now, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and related trades in the US.
If you run a field service business and you're tired of duct-taping three different tools together or paying enterprise prices for features you don't need — reach out. We'd genuinely like to talk to you.
Not a sales call. Just a conversation about what your operation looks like and whether Field is the right fit.
Traxs Group LLC is an Ohio-based software company building focused tools for small businesses. Field is the first of three planned products, field service management today, business management and CRM to follow.
Software for the businesses that keep things running.
Field runs field service from first call to final invoice. Get notified when new sign-ups reopen, or see how it fits with the rest of TRAXS One.