Hello! Bonjour!
I'm Nico. I make stuff. Mostly software. The kind that makes teams more productive.
- Jul 62026
Engineered, Not Vibed
I disappeared into my office for six weeks to build an AI agent framework. By the end I was debugging consequences of decisions I never made, four levels deep in a design I didn't choose.
aisoftware-engineeringaisefounding-story - Jul 42026
Building AiSE Kit: From Markdown Files to Multi-Agent Plugin
The theory is nice. But how do you actually ship it? It started as a folder I copied between projects. The single most surprising thing I learned: a markdown file that describes how to use a tool is the adapter.
aisoftware-engineeringaiseopen-source - Jul 42026
Making Agent Work Visible
When an agent built three features overnight, the activity feed just said 'MCP: updated status.' No name, no context, no accountability. That's not a team member. That's a ghost.
exponentialbuilding-in-publiclaunch - Jun 172026
Going Exponential
We shared Beats with a few people we trusted to be brutally honest. They were all blown away by how the decompose-and-spec approach made agent coding actually work. The rough edges? Expected for a first time in front of users.
exponentialbuilding-in-publiclaunch - May 272026
Ten Days That Changed Everything
The plan was modest: better drag-and-drop, some keyboard shortcuts. But once I started pulling the thread, the whole thing unraveled. The board wasn't a feature. It was the product.
exponentialbuilding-in-publicproduct - Apr 222026
The Lean AiSE Model
The first story through this process needs heavy specification. By the twentieth, the accumulated decisions have pruned most branch points away automatically. You only specify what's genuinely new.
aisoftware-engineeringaiseprocess - Apr 152026
Two Months of Beats
Two months in, the sharp irony hit: even though we now had an issue tracker that could decompose work, AiSE kit was keeping track of specs in markdown files instead.
exponentialbuilding-in-publicproduct - Mar 252026
Reviewing Documents with AI Should Be Better
When I want Claude Code to review a document, I can describe my comments in prose and hope it finds the right passage. Or I can manually annotate the file and pollute it with review artifacts. Both options are terrible.
aitoolsvscodeopen-source - Mar 232026
Design Trees and The Problem with Vibe Coding
The agent knows something you don't: where it would diverge. Ask it before it builds, 'what would you decide here, and what are the alternatives?' and suddenly you're pruning the design tree instead of rolling dice.
aisoftware-engineeringaisedesign - Mar 132026
Plugging holes in ORB
ORB had been in use for a few months at this point. We’d shipped it, built Sirius on it, written a lot of templates. It worked. But we’d never done a proper security review of the compilation pipeline, and that had been nagging at me.
rubysecurityopen-source