Research, applied.
Aitina Tech’s R&D wing applies the research of Imtiaz Hassan, published as The Software Lens, in client work and in our own product. The series asks what changes when software begins to reason at call time; these pages are what we do about it: one page per pattern, how we build it, and what an engagement looks like. The full research is on The Software Lens.
Two pieces are in active research on The Software Lens: Hire the AI Agent, Part 2 and Talk to Data. When they are published there, the applied pages follow here.
What is in research now, and what we will apply next.
Two pieces are in active research on The Software Lens. They are published there when they are right rather than when they are due, so there are no dates here; when they land, the applied view lands on this page.
Hire the AI Agent, Part 2
The first part argued that software stops being licensed and starts being hired. Part 2 is the harder half: what hiring actually looks like in a contract, how an agent is paid, measured and released, and what a buyer signs when the thing they are buying is a capability rather than a seat.
Follows Hire the AI Agent, SaaC and the end of SaaSTalk to Data
How to let people ask questions of their own data reliably, without handing a model the keys to the warehouse. Permission-aware retrieval, the queries an agent may and may not compose, what it is allowed to see versus what it is allowed to say, and the harness that makes the whole thing auditable.
Builds on the harness engineering workWant to know when one lands? Tell us which and we will send it: no list, no newsletter, just the piece.
Episodes : on The Software Lens
The video series, presented by Imtiaz Hassan. Each episode opens on The Software Lens, where the written research lives; Part 2 below is how we apply it.
Subscribe on YouTubeNew episodes are announced on the channel first.
Writing : articles and posts
Everything we have written, grouped by subject. Long-form research and shorter pieces from delivery work sit together, because the distinction only ever mattered to us.
Foundations : Start here
What actually changes when software begins to reason at call time. The seventy-year arc that led here, and the vocabulary the rest of the work uses.
SaaC : The delivery model
Software as a Capability. Why per-seat SaaS breaks when the caller is an agent, and what you hire, measure and settle instead.
AIM : The architecture
The Agentic Interface Model - where the seams go once microservices stop fitting, and what that looks like running on AWS Bedrock.
Agentic Economy : The market
What happens when agents transact: moats, regulation and the settlement artefact.
Integration , Where systems meet
Enterprise integration from EAI and SOA to agent-native: which patterns survive, which die, and what it means in higher education and financial services.
Notes from the work : Shorter pieces
Shorter pieces written from live engagements.
The research and development wing of Aitina Tech.
Most consultancies do their thinking inside client engagements and never write it down. The R&D wing exists so that the thinking behind our work is written down, argued in public and open to correction.
That argument is The Software Lens, the research series and video channel of Imtiaz Hassan. The R&D wing is where it meets practice: the frameworks published there are the ones our architects build to on Monday morning, and these pages record how.
It also says something about how we hire and how we work. Engineers here are expected to read, to disagree, and to bring an argument rather than a preference. Original thinking is part of the job description, not an after-hours hobby.
- Independent thinking. We give the answer that costs us work when it is the right one, including “do not build this”.
- Research before opinion. Every pattern we apply was published and argued in the open before we put it in front of a client.
- A creative environment. Time is set aside for R&D. It is protected, not squeezed into the gaps between billable work.
- Nothing to sign up for. The research is free to read on The Software Lens and the applied pages here are free too. Use them with another supplier if you like.
- Willing to be corrected. Each applied page shows its reasoning so you can disagree with it. That is the whole point of writing it down.
The research is independent. The application is ours.
Everything in the series started as a question from real engagements: an architecture that would not scale under agents, a knowledge layer that returned plausible nonsense, a delivery model that stopped making sense once the caller was not a person. Imtiaz Hassan publishes the answers in the open on The Software Lens; the applied pages here are what we do with them for clients.
Neither site asks for an email address to read. There is no signup, no newsletter and no gated PDF on either side.
We do not run an industry news feed. Repeating someone else’s announcement is not research, and their words are not ours to republish.
- No gated PDFs, no signup wall, no newsletter
- Every applied page links to the full research it is based on
- Updated as the research continues
- Reusable in your own decks, credit The Software Lens