This Week in EqIQ
A progress letter from Equine Data Systems for investors, partners and friends. Eight days ago EqIQ was a plan on paper. Today it is a working website you can click through.
Seven things to know
- EqIQ works. There is a real website with more than 8,000 sample horses, a vet's office, a place to buy and sell, a family area for young riders and an admin room. You can walk through all of it.
- It was built in eight days. 129 bundles of finished work were checked and added to the product. Engineers call these "pull requests." The live demo was updated more than 40 times.
- Every horse has an ID and a history that cannot be quietly changed. Anyone can press "Verify chain" and the site checks every record, link by link.
- It is fast. A horse search took 7 seconds on Wednesday. On Thursday it took a quarter of a second.
- Kids are protected. Anything about a young rider sits behind a locked door that the rest of the app cannot open. Nothing on the site ever says that someone is a minor.
- The doors are open to testers. Invited people get in with a Google sign-in. EqIQ now sends real email from its own address.
- It cost a fraction of the old way. About 174,000 lines of code, which a team of engineers would need a year or more to write, for about $2,500 of AI, all in, and 26 hours of Karl's time.
CARFAX for horses
Before you buy a used car, you can check a CARFAX report. It tells you who owned the car, what got fixed, and whether anything bad happened. Horses have nothing like that. A horse can cost as much as a house, and people still buy them based on screenshots, paper files and phone calls.
EqIQ fixes that. It gives every horse a permanent record that follows the horse for life, no matter who owns it or which vet it sees. The people who know the truth about a horse, like its vet, its farrier, or the breed registry, sign the facts they add. The owner decides who gets to look.
The first version of EqIQ does three jobs:
An ID for every horse
Each horse gets a 12-digit EqueID, like a license plate that never changes. People, places and events get one too. The horse's microchip number is the physical anchor.
A history nobody can quietly edit
Every important fact, such as a vaccination, a competition result, a sale, gets written once into a chain. Each new entry is locked to the one before it. Change an old entry and the chain breaks in plain sight.
Safe ways to buy, sell and get care
A step-by-step purchase flow that moves ownership when the deal closes. An auction room. A vet's office where a visit becomes a signed record on the horse's page the moment the vet finishes.
Two years of homework came first
The build was fast because the thinking was already done. Here is how the idea turned into a plan.
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October 2024
The idea gets a name
The eqiq.io web address is registered. For a while the working name was EqueFacts. That name lives on today as the name of the horse report.
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June to December 2025
First calls and first partners
Recorded planning calls start in June. In the fall, the team talks with payment and blockchain partners, including Platinum Payment Systems, and settles on the pitch that stuck: a Carfax and Zillow for horses, with a record that lasts the horse's whole life.
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February 2026
The business plan, in Notion
One big writing pass produces the plan: who the customers are (serious buyers and sellers first, then breeders, riders, vets, insurers), how EqIQ makes money, which rules apply, and what could go wrong.
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April 2026
The investor plan is rebuilt
Market size, unit economics, a five-year model and the "wedge": start as the record-keeping tool that vets and registries rely on, and grow from there. The plan gets a pressure test against similar companies.
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May 2026
Market research
A deep look at everyone nearby: vet software, farrier apps, barn tools, show and auction platforms, horse haulers, and the FEI's new Equipass digital passport. The finding: each one holds a piece, but nobody keeps a record that survives a change of vet, barn or owner. The same month, the design brief for the drawings is written.
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Summer 2026
The drawings
One Figma file, "EqIQ w Mobile," with about 60 screens: the home page, seven kinds of search, the horse page with its five tabs, the purchase flow, profiles for vets, farriers, trainers and athletes, stables, events and auctions, the account area, and a vet's office. Every screen drawn for desktop and phone, in Western and English looks. Last touched September 4.
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September 20, 2026
The plan on paper, then the build begins
In one day: the PRD (the product's rulebook, with about 130 numbered requirements and ten demo walk-throughs that define "done"), the data map (97 tables simplified down to 78), two big architecture decisions, and a build plan. Two independent reviews the same day found 63 issues before a single line of code was written. Then the build started.
Eight days, start to finish
Most of the work was done by teams of AI coding agents working in parallel, each on its own copy of the code, with a reviewer checking every bundle before it went in. Karl made the calls.
Plan, then foundation
- The PRD, data map, architecture decisions and build plan are written and reviewed.
- The code home is created on GitHub.
- Overnight: the full database, the rulebook of 179 API operations every screen must use, the record chain, the locked door for minors, sign-in, permissions and the design colors and fonts.
Live before dawn
- 3:35 a.m. Mountain time: the first release. Sample data is loaded (54,331 rows, 5,071 signed history entries) and demo.eqiq.co answers.
- By breakfast: the first horse list and horse page with sample data.
- Evening: a design review with 34 findings; Karl rules on all of them in one sitting.
- Overnight: 16 bundles of work land the Discover and Horse Record milestones.
Discover, the horse record, and more
- Search for all seven kinds of things. Home page, alerts, news, ads.
- Profiles for vets, farriers, trainers, athletes, haulers and stables.
- The whole horse page: data, performance, EqueValue, health, care. Add a Horse. Sharing. The EqueFacts report. Membership plans and settings.
- The line "CARFAX for horses." is chosen.
- Evening: the ledger page, the vet's office, buying, auctions and the family area go in.
Trust, vets, buying and families land
- Everything from Monday night is checked and merged. Every planned milestone except the final polish pass is now in.
- A switch is added that can hide every sample record without deleting one.
- A brief goes out for real-looking descriptions and photographs for the sample data.
It starts to look like the drawings
- 6,747 written descriptions and 10,607 photographs are added to the sample horses, people, stables and events.
- The fonts, colors, corners, buttons, header and menus are matched to the Figma file. The search pages get the drawn layout. The ad artwork goes where it was drawn, on phone and desktop.
- A bug that could let two people win the same auction lot is fixed.
- A performance review finds that a horse search takes 7 seconds. A 30-point fix-it plan is written.
Fast and steady
- Horse search: 7 seconds to 0.23 seconds. A signed-in horse page does a quarter of the database work it did before.
- Four "two things at once" bugs are closed, including one in bidding and one in buying.
- Error reporting is cleaned up so real problems are seen and noise is not.
- The home page gets its rotating competition photos and the line "Every horse, verified."
The big Friday
- Horse, athlete and professional pages rebuilt to match the drawings exactly.
- The tester gate goes live: invited people sign in with Google. No developer account needed.
- EqIQ sends real email from its own address, msg.eqiq.co.
- Pedigree boxes become clickable, three generations deep.
- The admin room: user list, two-factor sign-in for admins, a security log, and every API call marked public or private.
- Releases no longer touch the demo's data. Reloading sample data is now a deliberate button.
- Import a whole barn of horses from a spreadsheet. 2,349 main photos refreshed.
Email, start to finish
- Branded emails: confirm your account, reset your password, availability requests, invoices, with one-click unsubscribe.
- Admin → Email: preview any email, edit the wording with a rich text editor, keep every version, send a test to yourself, and schedule seasonal looks.
- Plans written and queued for search-engine visibility, person profiles, and privacy and SOC 2 work.
- This letter.
A tour of the product
Screens below are real screenshots from the live demo, taken today. Every horse, person, price and ad is sample data. The ad artwork comes from the design file and does not mean those brands are sponsors.
1. The foundation
Nothing you can click, and the most important part. Built first, on the first night, so that everything after it could be built fast and safely.
- The database. 83 tables that describe horses, people, places, events, sales, health records and more. Five "backbone" tables hold the main things. Everything else hangs off them.
- One rulebook for every screen. Before any page was drawn in code, the complete list of things the system can do was written down: 218 operations today. Every button on every page uses that list and nothing else. A future phone app or an outside partner plugs into the same list.
- A pretend mode. The whole website can run with no database at all, using realistic fake answers. Screens got built and tested while the real back end was still being written.
- Sample data made by code. Thousands of horses, people, events and history entries are generated the same way every time, through the real code, so every sample record's history truly verifies.
- Automatic checking. More than 2,000 automated tests run on every change. Each proposed change also gets its own temporary copy of the website and database to be tested on before it can be merged.
2. The horse record
The heart of EqIQ. One page per horse with five tabs: Horse Data, Performance Stats, EqueValue, Health and Care.
3. The trust ledger
Every attestable fact about a horse goes into a chain. Each entry is hashed to the one before it. A hash is like a fingerprint of the data: change one letter and the fingerprint changes.
4. Search and directories
Seven kinds of things to search: horses, veterinarians, farriers, athletes, trainers, stable suites and carriers. Plus events, competitions and auctions. One search template serves all of them.
5. Buying, selling, events and auctions
A listed horse can be bought in a guided flow. When the sale closes, ownership moves in one step and the bill of sale is filed. Auctions have a live room with mock bidding. No real money moves anywhere in the demo.
6. The vet's office
A separate workspace for veterinarians. A vet writes up a visit, presses Finalize, and the record appears on the horse's Health tab as a signed entry in the chain. The invoice follows.
7. Families and young riders
Youth riders are a huge part of the horse world. A parent links a child's account, sets daily and weekly time limits, chooses how the child's name appears to others, and approves anything that costs money.
8. Your account
My Horses, favorites, requests sent and received, your vet, farrier and trainers, membership and billing, security and preferences.
9. The front door, and the mail
The demo is private. Invited testers sign in with Google or a one-time link. Owners of the demo manage the list. And EqIQ now sends real, branded email.
10. The admin room
Only a platform admin with two-factor sign-in gets in. Every admin action is written to a security log that cannot be edited.
11. On a phone
One website that fits every screen. The phone layouts follow the mobile drawings, not just a squeezed desktop.
152 decisions, written down
Every time the plan was silent or two documents disagreed, someone picked an answer and wrote it in a log. These are the ones that made the biggest difference. The small codes point to the log entry.
Works better
- Say what it is in four words. "CARFAX for horses." sits under the search box. D-066
- Real photos on the front page. Five rotating competition photographs and "Every horse, verified." replaced a placeholder. D-107
- Match the drawings exactly. Corners, buttons, fonts, tabs and navigation now follow the Figma file, and the pages were rebuilt to prove it. D-103, D-121 to D-124
- Click through the family tree. Pedigree boxes open the ancestor's own record, three generations back. D-129
- Bring the whole barn. Import horses from a spreadsheet, checked one record at a time. D-140, D-142
- Real ads where they were drawn. Phone and desktop artwork, each at its own size. D-099, D-101
Faster
- Search in a quarter of a second. Two missing indexes and a rewritten query took horse search from 7 seconds to 0.23. D-113
- Do the work once per page. A signed-in horse page went from about 127 database lookups to 34. D-117
- Keep the database awake. No more freeze on the first click of a demo. D-108
- Remember things that rarely change. Ads, alerts and news are cached for five minutes. D-119
- Wait for the pause. Typing in a filter searches when you stop typing, not on every letter. D-111
- Never work while holding the lock. The chain's one global lock is held for a moment, not for a whole request. D-118
Safer for people
- A locked door for kids' data. Anything about a minor lives in a separate part of the database. The app's everyday login has zero permission there. It can only ask narrow yes-or-no questions. D-031
- Birth dates are scrambled. A child's birth date is stored encrypted, never as plain text. D-011
- Nobody is labeled a minor. No page, search result or log ever says it. A protected kid's page looks like an adult who chose extra privacy. D-012, D-027
- A parent signs. No purchase, bid or paid entry can be completed by a minor alone. D-095
- Time limits that feel fair. Daily and weekly limits by day of the week, and an "ask for more time" button instead of a hard block. D-069
- Contact details stay masked until the owner unlocks them or the viewer's plan allows it. D-056
More secure
- Two-factor for every admin. A stolen password alone does not open the admin room. D-133
- Impersonation with a reason and a clock. "View as this user" needs a written reason, ends after 30 minutes, and never reaches family data. D-134
- Secrets never reach a log. Passwords and connection details are scrubbed from every log line and error report. D-110
- Public or private, every API call. Each operation is marked, and the API documentation shows a visitor only what they may call. D-131
- A front door for testers. Google sign-in or a one-time invite link, so nobody needs a developer account. D-125, D-126
- Sale papers in a private vault. Bills of sale live in access-controlled storage, streamed only to the people in the deal. D-120
More reliable
- Every change gets its own test database. Nobody's test run can damage anyone else's work or the live demo. D-013, D-034
- Nothing merges without passing. More than 2,000 automated tests and a preview website stand between a change and the live demo. E-014, D-042
- Releases leave the demo's data alone. Shipping code and reloading sample data are two separate, deliberate acts. D-141
- Only one winner. A bid is judged against every other bid on the lot, so two people cannot both win in the same second. D-105
- Paying twice pays once. A replayed "Confirm and pay" settles the same sale, not a second one. D-092
- A switch for sample data. Every sample record can be hidden without deleting one, and the switch refuses to run on the wrong database. D-096, D-100
Eight days in figures
The code, the cost, and the time it would have taken
Three questions people ask right away. How much was built, what did the AI cost, and what would this have taken the old way? Here are the numbers and how they were counted.
Lines of code
Counted from the code repository today. "Hand-written" means an engineer, human or AI, typed it on purpose. Files that machines produce on their own, like the API schema file and the sample horse descriptions, are listed separately and not counted as written work.
Over the eight days, 205,560 hand-written lines were added and 8,443 were removed or rewritten, in 138 commits. The app has 778 source files, 237 test files and 91 page routes.
AI credits
The build ran on Claude, through Claude Code, Anthropic's tool for coding with AI. Every message it exchanged is on record, so the count below is measured, not guessed. A "token" is about three-quarters of a word.
What that would cost at pay-as-you-go prices: about $5,180 across the four models used. What was actually paid is less, because the work ran on a Claude Max subscription, a flat $200 a month, topped up with extra usage credits when the weekly allowance ran out.
What was actually paid, all in:
The bars show Claude usage by day at list prices. The busiest day was Monday the 22nd, when Discover, the horse record, the ledger, the vet's office, buying, auctions and the family area all went in. The Claude figures are measured from the transcripts; the Codex figure is Karl's estimate. Not included: the ordinary hosting bills for Vercel, Neon and Resend.
The human equivalent
How long would this have taken a team of people? Nobody can know exactly, so here are three ways to estimate it, and they land in the same range.
1. Bundle by bundle. Each of the 129 merged bundles was sized the way an engineering manager would: a small fix at most of a day, a medium feature at two to three days, a large one at a week, the biggest at eight days, all including tests and review. Plans and docs at half a day to a day and a half. Total: about 380 engineer-days, or 3,050 hours.
2. Line by line. 174,000 lines of tested, reviewed code at a brisk professional pace of 200 to 400 finished lines a day is 435 to 870 engineer-days, or 3,500 to 7,000 hours.
3. Team and calendar. A four-person team (two senior engineers, one full-stack engineer, one designer who also writes the plans) would typically need six to nine months for this scope, or 4,000 to 6,000 hours.
Three to six thousand engineer-hours of work, done in eight days.
At a typical loaded rate of $120 an hour, that is $360,000 to $720,000 of engineering. It was bought for $1,900 to $2,500 of AI, all in, plus 26 hours of Karl's time: two hours on each of the five weekdays and two full Saturdays, during which he typed about 200 instructions and decisions into Claude Code. That is well over a hundred times cheaper than the human way. Hours saved: roughly the whole range above, minus those 26.
How the work was organized. A lead session reads the plan and writes a short brief for each lane of work. Builder agents take a lane each, in their own copy of the code, so they never collide. A reviewer agent checks every bundle against the plan before it can merge, and fixes what it finds. A watchdog task wakes a run back up after a usage limit. Every one of these rules lives in the repository as a written playbook, so a new session, or a new person, can pick up where the last one stopped. The numbers above are what that machine produced in its first week.
What is left in the plan
Every milestone in the original build plan is in except the last polish pass. Here is what is still open, in order.
Next up
- The full walk-through on the live demo. All eleven demo scripts, on a laptop and on a phone, start to finish. Each piece has been tested on its own; the whole thing has not been walked in one pass.
- Testers get real accounts. Today the gate proves who you are. Next it creates your EqIQ account, with sign-in codes by email.
- Fill the last empty spots. Athlete results and videos, a few professional photos and galleries, horse fields that still say "Not recorded."
- Before anyone outside sees it: a security audit, a speed benchmark, and a code-health check.
- Membership polish and the small fixes reviewers noted along the way.
Queued and planned
- Person pages for people who are not professionals, with privacy controls. Planned and ruled on.
- Be found by name. Search-engine and AI-answer visibility with clean web addresses like eqiq.co/veterinarians/alan-walker-dvm. Planned; waiting for the go.
- Import photos from links in the spreadsheet import.
- The rest of the fifty emails, each shipping with its feature.
- Privacy, security and SOC 2 work, scheduled for the end of the build, before the first real user.
Later
- Real payments. The demo mocks every card and bank step behind an interface, so a real provider drops in.
- A real blockchain anchor. The chain is real; the anchor is simulated. The slot for TAP, Polygon or Base is built.
- Native phone apps. Today it is one website that installs like an app.
- The public eqiq.co page with a waitlist, and a support chat.
- Registry and microchip connections to AQHA, USEF, FEI and the Jockey Club.
Good to know before you share this
- The demo is private. To look around, ask Karl for an invitation link or to add your Google address to the tester list.
- No real money, card numbers or bank details exist anywhere in the system. Every payment is pretend.
- Every horse, person, stable and event is sample data. Real names and brands from the design file were replaced, except the ad artwork, which is shown as drawn and does not mean a sponsorship.
- The record chain is real and verifiable. Its anchor to an outside blockchain is simulated for now, by design.
- Reloading the sample data erases what testers did on the demo. That is now a deliberate button, never a side effect of a release.