Tejas P Mehta, founder and CTO of Mavin Agency

I started writing PHP code in 2005 in a small office in Surat, Gujarat, India. Manual deployments on Friday afternoons. No CI/CD. No Git discipline. XML files that I was absolutely convinced were a reasonable way to pass data between systems.

Twenty years later, I use AI to draft BRDs, push tickets to JIRA, review code, and build support bots and agents in plain PHP and MySQL. I do it with a consistency and speed my 2005 self would not have believed.

This blog is about that gap. It’s a set of practical, step-by-step AI tutorials for developers, tech leads, PMs and founders: no hype and no shortcuts, and every example comes with code you can run.

Start here

Everything on this blog is organised into complete series. Pick the one that matches where you are:

  • AI-Powered Dev Workflow (10 posts): using Claude across a real project, from BRD and functional spec through JIRA tickets, test cases, CLAUDE.md and code review. Start here if you lead or manage software work.
  • Build a RAG-Powered Support Bot in PHP & MySQL (11 posts): chunking, embeddings, vector search in stock MySQL 8, grounded answers with citations, evaluation. Start here if you’re a developer who wants to understand RAG by building it.
  • AI Agents in PHP (8 parts): tool calling, the agent loop, memory, guardrails and human approval, then evaluating and shipping. It builds on the RAG series.

The code for the RAG and Agents series is on GitHub, with a Gemini setup (free tier, so you can learn without paying) and an OpenAI setup. The logic is the same in both, and only the API layer differs.

Who I am

I’m Tejas P Mehta, founder and CTO of Mavin Agency, a software development firm I started in 2016. We’re a team of 25+ people who have built web and mobile apps, AI and automation, and cloud infrastructure for 100+ clients, mostly startups and early-stage founders in SaaS, eCommerce and fintech, across the USA, Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

Before Mavin, I worked my way up a ladder (the full story is in My Journey Through 20+ Years in the IT Industry) that will be familiar to many engineers who stayed in the trenches long enough: junior programmer, senior developer, team lead, software architect. At Kintu Designs (2006–2008) I first saw what happens when code meets real business requirements. At Neal Infotech I spent five years learning to lead, first technically and then organisationally. By the time I joined Paperclip Software as a software architect in 2013, I knew what I valued: systems that last, teams that trust each other, and documentation that helps the team rather than collecting dust.

Running delivery at Mavin taught me where time goes in software projects. The biggest drain, again and again, was documentation: keeping BRDs, FRDs, Confluence pages and JIRA tickets current, aligned and useful. We did it because we had to, and nobody enjoyed it.

Where AI comes in

After two decades in this industry, I’m sceptical of anything that promises to change everything. I’ve seen plenty of things make that promise.

Claude was different. It didn’t win me over in a demo. It won me over by being useful in my actual workflow. I could hand it a rough brief and get back a structured BRD that needed editing, not a rewrite. I could paste in a functional document and get JIRA tickets that were accurate. It caught issues in code review that I’d have caught on a second pass, which I rarely had time for.

That’s the lens for everything here. AI isn’t a replacement for engineering judgment. It’s an amplifier of it, and only if you understand what’s happening under the hood. That’s why the RAG and agent series build everything from scratch in plain PHP and MySQL, with no frameworks hiding the important parts.

Who this is for

  • Developers who want to move faster and understand AI well enough to build with it, not just call it.
  • Tech leads who want to cut the documentation and review overhead on their teams.
  • PMs who want better requirements documents in less time.
  • Founders who want to know what AI features really cost to build and run.

The technical background

Degree in Information Technology and a postgraduate diploma. Twenty years of PHP and MySQL. API integrations across Google, Facebook, AWS, Stripe and others. Open-source platforms including WordPress, Drupal, Laravel and CodeIgniter. DevOps on AWS and Azure. I write, I talk to clients, I review code, and I still have opinions about database schema design that I’ll share at length if you give me an opening.

Find me elsewhere