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AI Native OS
Built In Austin Texas
Built In Austin Texas
Why am I violating every principle I know works?
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I've been building for months without a single customer demo.
Just terminal curls. Testing each service individually. Making sure the architecture holds.
Every startup book says I'm doing this wrong.
Ship fast. Get customers. Iterate based on feedback. Don't build for scale until you have traction.
I'm doing the opposite.
And it keeps me up at night.
When you start building, you make a choice:
Point Solution:
Platform:
The MVP for these two approaches looks completely different.
Point solution MVP: 3 months, 10K lines of code, one perfect use case
Platform MVP: Months longer, hundreds of thousands of lines of code, works for everyone but perfect for no one yet
I chose platform.
And I question that decision daily.
"Ship fast and iterate."
"Don't build for scale you don't have."
"Your first version will be thrown away anyway."
"Get customers first, build infrastructure later."
All true. For most startups.
But what if you're building infrastructure?
What if hardcoding one customer's use case means rewriting everything for customer two?
What if "ship fast" means building technical debt you can't escape?
I'm not building a customer service tool for e-commerce.
I'm building an operating system for synthetic labor that works for:
If I hardcode for e-commerce, I'm fucked for medical billing.
If I build company-specific features, they become anchors.
Every decision has to be horizontal or it becomes technical debt.
I've built for months.
No fancy demo. No customer pilot. No revenue.
Just:
Hundreds of thousands of lines of code.
And I test it with curl commands in the terminal.
curl -X POST http://localhost:3000/api/v1/actions/run \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"verb": "shopify:get_order", "args": {...}}'
That's my demo.
Making sure each service works independently.
Making sure they compose correctly.
Making sure nothing is hardcoded.
No UI. No sales pitch. No "look how smart this AI is."
Just infrastructure that will work for everyone once it's done.
Every startup instinct says yes.
"You're overthinking it."
Build for one customer. Get it perfect for them. Then generalize.
"You're too slow."
Competitors will ship faster and steal your market.
"You don't know what customers want yet."
You're building in a vacuum. You need feedback.
All valid points.
All wrong for what I'm building.
When you hardcode customer-specific logic, it spreads like cancer.
Example: Building for e-commerce first
You hardcode:
Now try adding medical billing:
Medical billing needs:
You can't just "add" this.
You have to rip out the hardcoded e-commerce assumptions and rebuild the foundation.
That's not refactoring. That's rewriting.
Building horizontal costs time.
Instead of:
I have to build:
Every feature takes 3-5x longer.
Because I can't hardcode anything.
Everything has to be:
It's slower. Much slower.
Question 1: Am I too slow?
Competitors are shipping customer service AI tools every week.
I'm still building foundational services.
What if the market moves on before I ship?
Question 2: Am I overthinking this?
Maybe I should just build for one vertical.
Get e-commerce customer service perfect.
Generalize later when I have revenue.
Question 3: Have I lost my edge?
I've built and sold companies before.
I know how to ship fast and iterate.
Why am I violating every principle I know works?
Question 4: Is this really what an MVP looks like for AI employees?
Since when does an MVP have:
This feels wrong.
But every time I try to cut corners, I see the technical debt piling up.
Because I've seen what happens when you build vertical first.
At my last company:
We built for one use case. Got it working. Got customers.
Then tried to expand to adjacent markets.
We found it difficult to expand into recurring services.
The architecture was too specific. The assumptions were baked in too deep.
We had to choose: rewrite everything or stay narrow.
We stayed narrow. Made money. Sold the company.
But I always wondered: what if we'd built it right from the start?
I'm betting that:
1. AI employees are infrastructure, not features
Like operating systems. Like databases. Like cloud platforms.
Infrastructure has to be horizontal or it's useless.
2. The technical debt from vertical-first is unfixable
You can't bolt horizontal onto vertical.
You have to rebuild from the foundation.
3. The market will wait for something built right
Fast followers will ship customer service tools.
But they'll all be point solutions.
When enterprises need synthetic labor across their entire organization, they'll need a platform.
4. This is the only MVP that works
For point solutions, ship fast and iterate.
For infrastructure, the MVP is the foundation that everything builds on.
You can't ship half an operating system.
I'm months into building.
No revenue. No customers. No demos.
Just services talking to each other through curl commands.
Testing:
If the answer is "yes, but only for e-commerce" — I rebuild it.
If the answer is "yes, for everyone" — I move to the next service.
Will this work?
Don't know. Won't know until I ship.
Am I too slow?
Maybe. Competitors are moving fast.
Is this the right approach?
Ask me in two years.
Have I lost my mind building an MVP this complex?
Probably.
I can't build AI employees as a point solution.
The whole concept is horizontal:
If I hardcode for one vertical, I'm not building AI employees.
I'm building a really expensive chatbot.
Point solution or platform.
Vertical or horizontal.
This choice determines everything:
You can't undo it later.
Refactoring vertical to horizontal isn't refactoring.
It's rebuilding.
Months in. No customers. Hundreds of thousands of lines of code.
Testing with curl commands.
Violating every startup principle.
Wondering if I'm building the right thing the right way.
Or if I'm just overthinking an MVP that should have shipped months ago.
Every time I think about cutting corners:
"What happens when customer two has different requirements?"
If the answer is "rebuild the foundation" — I'm building it wrong.
So I keep building horizontal.
Even though it's slower.
Even though it violates startup orthodoxy.
Even though I won't know if it was worth it until I ship.
Point solution or platform.
That's the question.
And whatever you choose on day one becomes either:
Your moat — if you chose right
Your technical debt — if you chose wrong
I chose platform.
Ask me in two years if I was right.
For now, I'm just running curl commands and making sure the foundation holds.
Because once you ship, the architecture is locked.
And I'd rather ship slow with the right foundation than ship fast with technical debt I can't escape.
Even if every startup book says I'm doing this wrong.