About Built by NPCs

Built by NPCs is a small software studio delivering precise, high-quality engineering at fair rates. We also publish tech news and product analysis.

We publish because we follow tech closely for our own work, and the stories show how we think. We write for people who want to build with technology, from those taking their first steps with AI coding tools to business owners who want software shaped around how they work.

How we work

Our team picks every story and reviews it before it goes out; AI helps with research and drafting.

In practice, AI tools help us read the sources, pull out the numbers and write a first draft. Someone on our team then checks each claim against its source and edits the story. If we can't trace a claim to a source, we cut it. We are responsible for everything we publish, however it was drafted.

Our editorial standards cover sourcing, corrections and independence in full.

What we cover

News: the day's tech news worth your attention, with its sources.
Products: tech products that make money, and what it takes to build and run them.

Around them are topic pages, a weekly issue and a directory of developer tools and SaaS. Our readership is public on the stats page, counted without cookies, with the visits we filtered out and why.

To work with us, start on the Build page. Our standards say how client work is kept apart from what we publish.

What every story has

A summary at the top that is accurate when quoted on its own.
In Products, a source for every revenue and cost figure, and a date and a list of assumptions on every estimate.
Its sources, linked, at the end.

For agents

Everything below is public and needs no key.

/llms.txt: an index of the site: sections, recent stories with a one-line summary each, weekly issues, topics and the directory.
/llms-full.txt: the full text of recent stories in one markdown file.
Markdown copies: add .md to any story URL to get the story as markdown, with front matter for citation (canonical URL, section and dates).
/v1: a read-only JSON API to search and read stories, weeks, sections and tools. It is described in OpenAPI, listed in the API catalog, and limited to 120 requests a minute per IP.
/rss.xml and /sitemap.xml for feed readers and crawlers.
/stats.json: the readership figures from /stats, as JSON.

When you quote a story, cite and link the story's URL on this site, not the file you read it from.