About Brad Stancel

I'm Brad Stancel. I founded ProcessFast, a software company that designs, builds, and runs its own products, and I've spent more than a decade building its first and largest one, Ops Insights: reporting and business intelligence for title agents and underwriters.

Before ProcessFast, I spent years as a technical consultant in enterprise software. That work taught me where I'm most useful: in the gap between “the software” and “the business,” where someone has to understand both well enough to make the right call. ProcessFast is its own customer, and we've never taken outside investors, so every build, buy, and hire decision has been mine to live with.

Why my work doesn't fit one job title

The problems I like don't stay in one discipline. In a single week I might trace a production failure from an application through Kubernetes to a storage volume in the wrong AWS availability zone, write the SQL behind a report a title agency runs every morning, and tune how an AI agent checks its own work.

Most specialists live in one layer of the stack. I'm interested in the interfaces between them, because that's where modern systems tend to break, and increasingly where AI agents need the most help.

How I use AI

I use several AI systems every day, cloud-hosted and running on my own hardware, and I treat choosing between them as an engineering decision. A frontier model might write a detailed specification while a local model on my DGX Spark cluster implements it. Anything sensitive, or anything that has to keep working offline, runs on hardware I own.

Outside the office

I'm a voracious, self-taught learner, and I mostly learn by taking on a real project. I've become handy with HVAC diagnosing my own systems, built a solar and battery setup for the house, run a small off-grid radio network, and I'm working toward machining replacement parts that nobody makes anymore. The lab page has the details.

I also handle the technology behind my wife Shirly's embroidery business, Clever Orchid, and I rebuilt the website for a neighbor's dental practice, Complete Dental Care. Small businesses get stranded by technology vendors as badly as enterprises do, usually with less recourse, so I enjoy that work.