What if ...?
Welcome to my inaugural Substack series where I’ll be exploring the question of “What if …?” — “What if we took {x} and did {y}?” or “What if {x} were now possible?” — in the age of AI agents for consumer, dev tools, and B2B SaaS. I’ll be building and sharing learnings along this journey from the vantage point of an ex-founder, ex-rocketship, and ex-BigTech engineer and manager who’s worked on product, platforms, and data.
I’ve gotten to vibe a-dozen-or-so side projects through the evolution of vibing tools: from pure APIs in 2021, to abstractions over APIs, to IDEs+extensions, to workflow builders, to CLI agent harnesses, to whatever’s next.
I recently left Stripe, where I worked on agent interfaces, data, and analytics, to do this full time for the next few months.
I’ll be exploring two broad areas in this journey:
Agent harness infrastructure to increase the runtime of agent turns and decreasing human-in-the-loop interventions.
The vibed product/platform itself
Some of my past “What if …?” projects are below:
What if … you could hyper-personalize grade-school reading education?
https://www.talebuilder.com is an example of using grade-school reading cirriculums to hyper-personalize reading difficulty and content for elementary school students.
What if … you could democratize traffic lawyer services?
https://www.ticketfight.ai is an example of taking an expensive, but repetitive traffic lawyer service, and automating it with an agent.
What if … you could fully automate game development?
https://www.golfingcorgis.com is an example of an agent building an Angry Birds clone using 100% AI-generated art, music, game mechanics, level generation, landing page marketing, and publishing to web, iOS, and Android.
What if … agents could become professional-level gaming coaches?
https://www.starcraft2.ai is an example of providing an agent with professional game replays, strategies, and tactics to democratize pro-level game coaching for an underserved gaming community.
What if … you could get a previous SOTA coding agent running locally with no (additional) token costs?
In this example, I forked an OSS agent harnesses to run Gemma 4 E2B locally on a stock MacMini.
Finally, there’s the meta what-if question:
What if … an agent could do this exploration for me?
Pico - my home OpenClaw setup that currently only maintains the projects above.
Expect posts to be unpolished and irregular in cadence. Subscribe if you’re interested in following along or reach out if you want to chat!
Thomas