A behind-the-scenes story about a fast-moving team, the limits they hit, and why they brought in GoLive Software.
The first call with Achille.ai felt like talking to our younger selves: product-obsessed, moving fast, and allergic to meetings longer than 30 minutes. One founder joked, “We ship by Friday or it doesn’t exist.”
But soon their clients wanted more: “Can we search all our sales documents in plain English?” “Can we build an assistant that never makes things up?” The team tried plugging in an LLM API. It worked… until it didn’t. “We can demo it,” one dev told us, “but we can’t trust it.”
Where the Gaps Showed Up
The structure was solid—product owners close to customers, full-stack devs who could span front to back, and data people who kept dashboards alive. The missing piece was deep AI engineering: RAG design, LangChain orchestration, and production-grade Python performance.
The Call to GoLive Software
Achille.ai didn’t want a black-box vendor. They wanted a guide who had already shipped this kind of stack. Together we framed a clear mission:
- Design a robust RAG pipeline that ingests PDFs, CRM exports, and database rows without crumbling.
- Use LangChain as a real framework—memory, tools, routing, and evals—not just a quick demo.
- Tune Python for production: caching, streaming, fallbacks, tracing, and autoscaling.
Before vs After
Before
- Great demos, unreliable answers.
- No evaluation, no monitoring.
- Vector search only; poor relevance.
- Latency spikes, cost overruns.
After
- Grounded answers with citations.
- Nightly evals & drift alerts.
- Hybrid retrieval + rerank.
- Response cache & smooth UX.
Why Vietnam for Engineering Talent?
Achille.ai also asked: *“Why Vietnam?”* The answer: the mix of skill, culture, and cost-effectiveness is hard to beat.
| Factor | Why Vietnam Stands Out | Impact for Clients |
|---|---|---|
| Cost Efficiency | Competitive daily rates vs Europe/US. | Extend runway, hire senior without overspending. |
| Timezone Advantage | UTC+7, 5–6h ahead of Europe. | Work progresses overnight; overlap in mornings. |
| Education & Skills | Strong CS grads; Python, JS, AI popular. | Devs ready for LangChain, Next.js, ML ops. |
| Work Ethic & Culture | Adaptable, deadline-focused, collaborative. | Smooth teamwork, respectful comms. |
| Stability | IT outsourcing booming for a decade. | Long-term partnerships, not one-off gigs. |
Little Wins That Mattered
- OCR fixed “invisible” scanned PDFs—suddenly search worked.
- One chunking tweak (respect H2s) cut 80% of half-answers.
- A single tone rule made outputs client-ready.
- A “Was this useful?” button gave the best training data.
