Hello! Bonjour!
I'm Nico. I make stuff. Mostly software. The kind that makes teams more productive.
- Aug 42026
The Work(tree) Incident
We got lucky. The primary checkout happened to be idle on main when the second agent called xpo start. If it hadn't been, the first agent's uncommitted work would have been gone.
exponentialbuilding-in-publicaisoftware-engineering - Jul 242026
Who Watches the Supervisor
The quality ceiling of an agentic loop is set by the reviewer, not the builder. I spent weeks optimizing the wrong agent before I figured that out.
exponentialaisoftware-engineeringbuilding-in-public - Jul 112026
Silence Reads as Slowness
The agent was completing stories faster than I could manually. But watching a blank terminal for ninety seconds feels like watching paint dry. The problem was never speed. It was silence.
exponentialbuilding-in-publicuxai - Jul 92026
Adding Agentic Loops to Exponential
Every coding session followed the same script. Prep a spec, transition the story, create a branch, build, ask for a walkthrough. I was prompting the same sequence every time. The ideas for what to do about that were already out there.
exponentialaisoftware-engineeringbuilding-in-public - 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