SaaS is dying·I build software for one family instead·and publish all of it.
Systems mind, maker's hands. The claim, the evidence, and the person are below.
📓 Read Manual Override, my blog on an AI running my real operations ↗
SaaS is dying, and capital corrupted it. That is my claim after fifteen years of building for strangers. It is where I put my effort, and there is an exit: a SaaS can be less SaaS, leaving more data with the people it belongs to.
The hardest part of a SaaS was never the job it does. It is permissions and tenant management: keeping thousands of strangers separated, billed and safe. Strangers' data brings policies, GDPR-class regulation and fines. Build it for one family and that layer evaporates. The conditions fall by orders of magnitude, and what remains is the job, behind one door.
The argument the full argument ↗ the playbook ↗ one person at a time ↗
Mission control for one household: a work board ranked by my exact words; the build fails when they are missing. Rules are tests, each shown to catch its own violation. Machines are lit only by dated successes. The family test script has no recorded results yet.
The board the floor ↗ the story ↗ the live board ↗ the test script ↗
The family a deed game ↗ a walkable town ↗ the show ↗ its safety rules ↗
Comms run on threads: durable records with a private app over them, carrying me and my agents today. Messages to outside counterparties go through a disclosed assistant queue on channels I monitor. External parties directly on the threads is still only the direction.
Senku names both. It is borrowed from Senku Ishigami of Dr. Stone, an engineer who wakes early in a world that must be rebuilt from first principles and starts with what he has. Waking early is my choice; a family and an engineering background are the toolkit.
Fifteen years in software. Principal Engineer at Property Finder, the person other engineers escalated to, reaching back to government-grade, real-time command-and-control systems.
The play, as senku runs it now:
The takeover tree this page links names every lane I have open, and that list is long. That normally reads as someone who cannot finish anything, and it is a fair first reading. Here is the real one.
It is one search. AI has already changed what a skill is worth. Past tense, and that is the part people keep filing under later. I do not know what still holds value on the other side of it, and I do not trust my own opinion about that, so each project is a probe. Build the real thing, publish it while it is still ugly, and find out which ones a stranger can pick up.
The runway is savings, and that is better said than implied. Years of engineering, the last stretch of them at Property Finder, paid for a block of time to run on. It is finite, which is exactly why lanes get closed.
So a pause is a decision, and each one carries its reason. Metal melting is parked, my own call: too complex and dangerous to take on now. One print job sits paused since 9 August 2026 while the attention went elsewhere; the printers and their lanes keep working. A pause you can read is worth more than a page that shows only what is working.
Education has not caught up, and that is the part I cannot wait out. I have three children: an eldest who meets the old system first, and a youngest who will meet whatever replaces it. I would rather hand them a way of working than the standard advice, which is to acquire a generic skill set and then go and find a job. That advice comes out of a school design centuries old, and it has not moved much.
No in-work list lives here: hand-picked ones are true when written and false when read. What is being worked on is the takeover tree's job: every stream, its honest state, filtered to the clear ones by default because a thing you cannot act on is not an offer.
the takeover tree ↗ why there is no donate button ↗ the fnprint register ↗
Below, the index: every page this site serves.
The side of the economy that's physical and under-automated. With my hands, on real processes. Metal melting and casting is parked as too complex and dangerous for now.
Published as it was built, with the exact commands that emit every part.
The raw firmware log and the diagnosis. A flow limit belongs to a duration.
No CAD, no mesh, no slicer. Every setting derived from a measurement.
Three toolpaths and their direct renders show six, eight and twelve ellipses. Generated evidence only; nothing has been printed.
A display stand designed and built to your exact collectible. Nothing sold yet; you would be the first.
A real weight with a real name in it, made to order. Nothing cast or shipped yet; you would be the first.
Their name on the side, a heavy cast base so it stays put. Made to order; nothing shipped yet.
The design, mesh checks and simulation are published. The physical inventory is under review because this tree has no print log to resolve the page's conflicting historical counts.
Browser physics on the printed geometry, and the QA log the gate actually ran, verbatim. The sim says ORBIT; the physical marble gets the final word.
One socket standard, quantized angles, bend physics from the stave shelf. Design only; nothing printed.
Six single-wall towers, two beads wide to twelve, commanded to 100 mm, with collars every 6 mm so even a wrecked run reports its height. Designed and machine-checked; nothing printed yet.
A wall that saved material by not touching the layer below did not hold; vertical posts joined by bridges did. Two parts have printed complete, a 100 mm one and a 320 by 300 mm one that stood on the sixth attempt after five cancels. Neither has been loaded. It is a bucket in shape and does not hold liquid.
The day the 320 mm bucket stood, told mostly through what went wrong: a base failed twice, a bore was guessed twice and measured once, the gate turned out blind where the design lived, and a plate predicted to fail was printed anyway. The part has not been loaded; a larger one was printing when this was written, outcome unknown.
Roman owns this one. Exactly one case printed, 29 grams in half an hour; the phone it fits is still an open question, and the questions are on the page.
Twenty-six families of this workshop's own designs, each held at the stage the evidence supports. Two have a physical print behind them, and the page leads with that.
Opal acrylic with the dark QR modules printed straight onto the sheet, lit from behind. The generator works and is proven by an outside decoder reading its output back. Nothing physical exists: no sheet cut, no panel printed, no LED behind one.
Sliders for height, width, face count and module size, redrawing a stand live in the browser with no 3D library behind it. Every shape comes from the numbers on the sliders, so the drawing cannot disagree with them. What it is not: no material has been chosen, so nothing is coloured from a real sample; the lit glow is an invention because no panel has been made; the codes on the faces are decorative patterns; and price and delivery are not known, so they are not shown.
Including four that let through the exact bug they were written to catch.
The owner supplies outcomes, authority and judgment. Agents run bounded work through gates, and one real outage shows who detects, owns, escalates and closes a failure.
Three public positions on AI, agency and access, followed by an unproven proposal for turning capability into retained income or ownership. No pilot or beneficiaries yet.
Copy-ready Cloud Design prompts and their manual embedding status.
Olga's book in English: the strongest version, and how to make it better ›An AI-assisted English edition of Olga Malkova's style book: the clearest version we could assemble, plus a concrete plan to make the book itself stronger. Still in progress. The Russian original lives at omale.style.
A days-old, one-household operation publishing its own receipts, failures, and stated costs. One laptop, two consumer subscriptions, unproven at scale.
A verified failure record from our days-old, one-laptop agent fleet, including the guards that failed and the recovery paths still missing.
Autopsy two from the evidence desk: a cleanup race erased completed agent work before its patch reached durable storage.
A confession in progress about fourteen years of coercive control, told by the person who did the controlling. Interviews have begun; the repair and the book have no ending yet.
A sanitized view of its current focus, execution queue, active defaults, and durable insights. The full operational memory stays private.
Seven operational definitions from a Sufi map of the self. Research-based and versioned; the markers are an unvalidated synthesis for self-classification only.
A working experiment in one household: a second frontier model joins the primary one, and one produces while the other judges. Early stage.
One orchestrator, pull-based workers, declared locks, isolated builds, durable results, and the mechanisms still in progress.
A 15-minute argument in Russian, with an honest risks slide.
Four tools here prefer silence to a plausible answer. The pattern, and the real refusals from one week of getting it wrong.
40 nodes, 18 of them curated from other makers and credited by name. A single-person skill tree is a blog; a shared one is infrastructure.
Moving the making operation off-grid onto stored solar. The real rig, the measured numbers, the honest limits. An early experiment; dawn harvest ~21% of rated.
One 3-second maximal contraction a day, from a 2022 Niigata elbow-flexor study, drawn as a diagram from the study's real parameters with provenance on every number. The doing half is one person and has not started: zero sessions, zero measurements, zero republications. A version done at home has no dynamometer, so it is an adaptation, and the page says so in its opening paragraph and again under its stage panel.
One batch of kraut, chilled 2 August 2026, and four clinical trials read firsthand. Including the two that found close to nothing.
Seven emirates of OpenStreetMap lodging records in one offline sortable table. No guest rating exists on any row and the page says so up front: it finds candidates.
An inverted marketplace: we find suppliers and list public facts. Five listings are published in suppliers.public.json; no supplier registered, signed up or endorsed one.
Roman's study plan and examination record, written dad-readable and appended after each exam.
What admitted companies are on record doing, restated as exercises one person can perform, plus Oleg's own record graded on the same six dimensions. Zero practices published: the eight admitted companies satisfy one half of the rule, and the blind review that has to confirm each candidate has not been run. 21 candidates are held with the reason on the page.
Oleg is choosing where to work next and grades companies' public engineering records in the open: six dimensions, per-claim evidence with review dates, admission at 7 of 12. Eight companies admitted on 2026-08-25, adjudicated by name. One line each here; every dimension, grading reason and citation is on the evidence page, and the grading method is published beside them.
This page changes as the systems do, and corrections stay on it.
If you run an operation with a manual grind you've accepted as the cost of doing business, or you're building in that space, reach out.