Kevin Champlin · Software Architect · Founder & CEO, Champlin Enterprises, LLC
I am a software architect. Twenty years designing and shipping production systems: web platforms, native mobile, APIs, and the data layers underneath them. The judgment about what to build, what holds at scale, and what to throw away is mine, earned at the keyboard long before LLMs were useful. AI multiplies that foundation. It does not stand in for it.
What I Wish I'd Known Before Adding Claude to WooCommerce Checkout
Adding an LLM to a transactional path introduces failure modes traditional payment systems never see. Here is what broke in production.
Our products
Production SaaS from Champlin Enterprises — engineered, shipped, and operated in-house.
The white-label member-survey and Best Workplace certification platform for chambers of commerce — anonymous surveys, AI action plans, and industry benchmarks, branded as the chamber's own.
Visit chamberculture.com
The operational layer between acquisition and the front line — a live reconditioning workflow for every vehicle, so dealerships stop losing cars in the recon black hole.
See the product
The operating system for home-care agencies — scheduling, EVV, billing, CRM, and a family portal in one HIPAA-ready platform agencies actually want to use.
Visit bridgecareos.comHow I actually work
20+ years shipping production code before LLMs were useful: PHP, .NET, native iOS and Android, enterprise WordPress, distributed systems. Architecture is the part that does not come out of a model. Choosing the boundaries, the data model, the failure modes, and what to cut is judgment earned at the keyboard over two decades. AI is the leverage I bolt on top of that foundation because it earns its keep, not a foundation I lean on.
In practice that looks like 8+ hours a day driving Claude Code across dozens of production systems: scoped tasks, verified diffs, nothing committed I haven't read. I set the architecture first, then treat the model the way a senior staff engineer treats a strong but new IC. Clear scope, tight review loop, the bar set by me.
The frontier I'm currently working: machine learning guided by AI. I design the experiments and own the production constraints; Claude accelerates the iteration — feature-set hypotheses, model-class tradeoffs, reading validation curves, rewriting pipelines between runs. The ML models do the quantitative lift. Diamond and Vantage are running this loop in production.
Weekly standings · Lap of Aug 10, 2026
Six teams, one track, and a finish line nobody has crossed. Positions are scored on technology, real-world usage, and hype, then refreshed every week. The karts are not negotiable.
Scored weekly from Similarweb traffic, Menlo Ventures enterprise data, and Artificial Analysis benchmarks. My track, my stewards' decisions. Last updated Aug 11, 2026. New standings every Monday. Laps completed by anyone: 0.
Featured offer · For VPs of Engineering
Two-week audit. Three highest-ROI AI integrations identified, scoped, and ranked. One working pilot for the top pick. $15K flat, credited toward implementation if we build any of them.
For mid-market enterprises with 50–500 engineers, a codebase that's been in production three-plus years, and a board that mandated an AI strategy six months ago. No deck. No workshop. A senior engineer, two weeks, one shippable outcome.
Capabilities
Web, mobile, and applied-AI systems, architected and engineered in-house by Champlin Enterprises. Your code, your repository, your ship date, with no middle layers.
Web applications, APIs, and internal platforms built for production — full-stack across TypeScript, PHP, .NET, and Python. Designed to scale, documented to maintain, owned by you.
How we engineer itNative iOS (Swift/SwiftUI) and Android (Kotlin/Compose), plus Kotlin Multiplatform when one codebase should ship to both stores. App Store and Play Store ready.
Shipped appsLLM systems that survive production: agentic workflows, RAG pipelines, evals, and cost guardrails — including BrandForge, our multi-brand AI image studio for agencies.
AI capabilitiesCustom themes, custom plugins, headless WordPress, and performance tuning. Content systems that stay fast at scale and integrate cleanly with the rest of your stack.
WordPress workAbout
Kevin Champlin is a software architect. Champlin Enterprises, LLC is the firm he founded to do that work at scale. Systems are designed and engineered end to end here, with no handoffs and no offshore layers, and the standard holds whether the client is a Fortune 500 or a regional operator.
The firm ships its own SaaS (Chamber Culture, Auto Recon Manager, and BridgeCare OS, all architected in-house) and delivers senior engineering for Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 clients, including Levi Strauss & Co., Wells Fargo, and Mark Anthony Group. Twenty years across brand and platform work now sit behind a single discipline: software, architected and engineered well.
Selected Client Engagements
Current, recent, and earlier-career engagements with household-name clients. Scope detail under NDA — the names are the receipt.
Senior Full-Stack WordPress Engineer. Template modernization across Levi Strauss web properties — legacy-PHP cleanup, ACF-driven editorial agility, plus an LLM / answer-engine discoverability layer (llms.txt, JSON-LD entities).
Engineering on consumer brand systems across one of North America's largest beverage portfolios.
.NET and SQL Server at scale — PCI-audited transaction systems, SSIS pipelines, SAN-level storage optimization on an internal agent portal.
BrandForge
Spin up a workspace per client. Lock the faces, palettes, products, and tone of voice once—then render on-brand stills, ads, and product shots in seconds. Agency-grade output without the agency-grade retouching bill.
Open BrandForge to spin up your first brand workspace—lock the references, render in seconds.
New from Kevin Champlin
Just Use It is the no-jargon guide to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude for parents, students, business owners, and seniors. The Operator's Edge gives small business owners a 30-day plan to deploy AI across the whole business. Ship It is the field report on using AI to build two working apps in a single afternoon.
Open source
Six skills I built and lean on every day — context discipline, parallel agent audits, pre-deploy review. MIT-licensed, no signup, no upsell. Clone the repo, copy a folder into ~/.claude/skills/, and you're shipping with the same toolkit I am.
The standard
Systems designed and shipped for Fortune 100 banks, global consumer brands, and regional operators. The same hands now architect the firm's own products.
Web, iOS, Android, APIs, and data, architected together, so a product never lives on a handoff boundary.
LLM integrations built past the demo: guardrails, verification, and cost control. Architected like any other subsystem, not bolted on.
Principal-led delivery. Direct access, weekly demos, and code you own — shipped the moment it meets the standard.
From the journal
For more writing, see the Champlin Enterprises, LLC blog.
Adding an LLM to a transactional path introduces failure modes traditional payment systems never see. Here is what broke in production.
Read moreA bigger context window will never fix context loss. I audited 30 days of my own AI usage and found 73% of my spend was re-reading conversations I had already had. Here is the file-based system that fixed it.
Read moreA Fortune 500 apparel brand’s checkout failures spiked to 2% during a flash sale—here’s why understanding race conditions matters more than ever.
Read moreCommon questions
Kevin Champlin is a software architect with 20+ years designing and shipping production systems across web platforms, native mobile, APIs, and the data layers underneath them. He is also the founder and CEO of Champlin Enterprises, LLC. AI is a multiplier on that architecture foundation rather than a substitute for it: he designs the system and sets the constraints, then uses AI to move faster inside them.
Champlin Enterprises, LLC is a premium software firm led by Kevin Champlin. It ships its own SaaS products—Chamber Culture (a flagship platform for chambers of commerce), Auto Recon Manager (reconditioning software for car dealerships), and BridgeCare OS (an operating system for home-care agencies)—and delivers senior engineering for Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 clients.
Custom web applications, iOS and Android apps, applied-AI systems, and enterprise WordPress—engineered end-to-end across TypeScript, Swift, Kotlin, PHP, .NET, and Python. Code lives in your repository, owned by you, built to run in production.
Yes. Much of the firm's enterprise engineering runs for Fortune 100 banks, global consumer brands, and household-name apparel and beverage companies. Engagements are under NDA; the standard is not.
Yes. Regional businesses, nonprofits, chambers, and independent operators are welcome. The same senior team that ships for Fortune 500 clients builds regional projects to the same standard, scoped to fit.
Send the build details—what you're shipping, the constraints, the date—and you'll get a number, not a brochure. Flat fee where possible. Senior engineering, not a consultancy retainer.
Yes—self-serve. Three published books covering practical AI for operators, builders, and everyday users, plus the Generative Identity Engine (GIE), a hands-on platform for multi-product, multi-spokesperson AI campaigns. Training through content and tools, not hour-billed coaching.
20+ years across PHP, .NET, C#, TypeScript, JavaScript, Swift, Kotlin, and Python. Mobile in Swift/SwiftUI (iOS), Kotlin/Compose (Android), and Kotlin Multiplatform. Applied AI with Claude, GPT, Gemini, and custom agentic toolchains. Legacy modernization across Visual Basic and Classic ASP when it comes with the territory.
Start a project
Send me the details—what you're building, what's in the way, what ship date you need. I'll reply within 24 hours with a realistic plan, not a sales pitch.
Pit lane commentary