Our Story

It started with a golf app.

A few of us play every week and I wanted a simple way to manage the teams, track who's winning, handle the penalties, keep a history of scores and sort out the weekly booking.  I came across tools like Replit and Lovable — “vibe coding” platforms where you describe what you want and AI builds it for you.  I was blown away.  Within hours I had a working app on my phone.

That sparked something.  I wanted to go deeper.  So I took the risk of installing something called Claude Code — an AI coding agent that runs in your terminal.  If I'm being honest, it was pretty scary.  Command lines, security pop-ups, things I'd never touched before.  Luckily our team includes security experts and senior developers who helped me through it.  On evenings and weekends I started experimenting, and before long I'd built out a proper working application.

Along the way, every lesson came the hard way.  The AI initially stored data in the browser's local storage — which meant nothing was shared between users and everything disappeared on refresh.  I had to figure out databases, user logins, permissions.  And then the original golf app I'd built on Replit?  A suggested deployment update killed it completely.  I had to start from scratch.

That was the moment things crystallised for me.

There is a genuinely powerful technology here.  But the barriers to using it are too high for most people.

I kept thinking about all the people like me — people with ideas, domain knowledge, team leaders who know exactly what they need but don't know how to code.  People in small and medium-sized businesses whose requirements are too niche for off-the-shelf software.  Or whose business doesn't fit neatly into someone else's product — where the software is either overkill, too rigid, or forces you down a way of working that doesn't match how your business actually operates.

What if we could put this powerful tool in the hands of those people?

That became the mission behind QI.  Not just giving people access to an AI coding agent, but thinking through every barrier we'd encountered and designing a solution for each one.  Condensing the knowledge of our senior developers and security experts into the process itself — so you don't need them sitting beside you.

One of the biggest challenges with AI is context — if the model doesn't understand your business, it can't build something useful.  So we start with Landscape: a guided Q&A session where the AI learns about your organisation, your challenges, and your aspirations.  That becomes the foundation for everything it builds.  From there, it works with you through a structured discovery to produce proper product requirements and technical specifications — before a single line of code is written.

The tech stack is already baked in.  The design system uses one of the most beautiful and clean component libraries out there — so out of the box you get something that looks and feels professional.  Every app shows a live desktop and mobile preview right on the page that you can open in its own tab.  Everything runs in its own secure container, so you have a safe environment to experiment without risk.

We kept asking ourselves: what would trip up a non-coder?  What if you wanted to import existing data?  We built the Data Hub.  What if you needed to share contacts, organisations, locations, or assets across multiple apps?  We created shared entities.  What if different apps needed different data structures?  We made Data Packs.  What if you wanted to run dashboards, reporting, or compliance checks across multiple apps?  We built App to App.  What if you wanted different permissions for different people?  We built teams and groups.  Snapshots, automated backups, one-click deployment, attaching documents for the AI to reference, uploading your own logo, choosing your colour scheme — we tried to think of every friction point and remove it.  And through all of it, a look and feel that has the power underneath but is as simple and intuitive to use as we can possibly make it.

Security was core to the premise from day one.  Everything sits behind a tried and tested identity gateway.  Only you — or the people you explicitly give permission to — can see the apps you develop.

But we also had something else to bring to the table.

Alongside all of this, our business — Cutler IT — has been developing custom software for years.  We've built bespoke solutions for businesses with specific requirements, and over time we developed a comprehensive workflow platform with features that had been refined across dozens of real-world deployments: ticketing, job management, jeopardy management, asset tracking, procurement, scheduling, quoting, stock control, remote monitoring, a knowledge base with version control, notifications and more.

It was a powerful system.  But it wasn't always easy to grasp.  People had their own idea of how things should look and feel, and although our workflow engine could solve the problem, it was always solving it our way.

So we asked: what if we took all that power, logic and battle-tested code — twenty years of it — and made it available to the AI coding agent as modular building blocks?  What if, when someone describes what they need, the platform can weave in these proven modules where relevant — without the user ever needing to know the complexity underneath?

That is QI.

It's the AI coding agent, given the right context, with the barriers removed, backed by two decades of real-world software — all wrapped in a platform designed for people who have the ideas but not the code.

Oh, and the name?  That came from family Scrabble nights.  I'd play what I thought were perfectly good words, and then my wife or my brother-in-law Richard would drop a Q or a Z on a triple word score and beat me.  Qi — the Chinese word for life force or energy — was one of those words.  It stuck with me.  It also happens to share a name with a long-running BBC programme I love — QI, Quite Interesting — which felt rather apt.  And if you're wondering about the colour scheme?  That came from the Scrabble tiles too — although there is a dark mode if the beige is too much for you.

We hope you'll give it a try.