Field notes
What I’m learning while building Otto. Mostly engineering, sometimes the story behind a decision.
AI agents didn't eliminate the need for a team—they changed the currency from venture capital to human trust. The solo founders winning right now are using AI to compress costs while deliberately hiding the human scaffolding that actually keeps customers around.
Your LLM feature is degrading silently. Here's why your system prompt is a living liability, not a config file, and how to catch model drift before it hits your churn rate.
One post a week. No newsletter sludge.
ChatGPT threads are stateless, not archives. An AI decision journal gives your cofounder persistent memory of trade-offs and sacrifices, stopping the cycle of relitigating old mistakes at 2 a.m.
“The best cofounder is the one already in your pocket.”From the field, May 2026
I built three dashboards for Otto before I deleted them. Here's what changed when approvals moved to the place I was already reading messages on the toilet.
An agent said it shipped my landing page. It had not. This is the post I wrote at 1am after I figured out why, and what I changed.
Last Wednesday I context-switched 14 times before lunch. I counted. This is why I'm building Otto.