Five operating principles that shape every product we ship. They are written down because they have to outlive moods, deadlines, and trends. If a feature breaks one of them, the feature loses.
Every product we ship is built so an AI agent can use it fully — not just the limited slice that a public API exposes. The user connects the agent of their choice and the agent has authenticated, audited, full read and write access to everything the human can touch. Most modern software was written before this was a real constraint, and you can feel it: anemic APIs, hidden state, side-effects no programmable client could verify. We design for the inverse.
The same product carries two grammars. For the human there are minimum clicks, plain language, and the kind of layout that holds up on a distracted afternoon. For the agent there is structured data, deterministic behavior, idempotent operations, and the same surface expressed as a callable contract. Neither audience should feel like a second-class citizen. The product is finished when both can do their job in it without asking permission of the other.
User data lives on the user’s machine by default. Cloud sync is opt-in, end-to-end, and reversible. We do not proxy model traffic through our servers, intercept tokens, or hold credentials we do not need. This is partly a privacy stance and partly a performance one: local is faster, cheaper, and more honest about who owns what.
Email runs on Migadu and Resend. DNS runs on Cloudflare. Auth runs on the providers paid to do auth. We do not build mail servers, certificate authorities, or payment rails. The product value is the user experience and the agent integration on top, not the plumbing underneath. When a piece of plumbing fails it is replaced, not rebuilt.
The founder is the first user of every product, in their real working life, before anyone outside sees it. If the product does not solve a problem we actually have, it does not ship. This is not a slogan: it is a release gate. It also means the catalog grows slowly — we can only have so many real problems at once, and we refuse to ship to audiences whose work we have not done.
Five principles, stated plainly, are easier to defend than fifty.