paul@byte-sized.io Denver, CO
Paul Barrick
Building agentic systems and marketing infrastructure that ships in days, not quarters.
I build software with AI agents — Optimus (a context engine for engineering teams), the harness layer that lets it swap models, and a steady stream of musings on what changes when development becomes agentic.
What I'm shipping
Optimus and two of the components that make it more than a kanban tool.
Optimus
v0.9 · in productionoptimus
An agent-native engineering platform. Plans, stories, docs, git history, goals, and daily flow all live in one composable world-context engine — built so a small operator + a fleet of agents can ship like a large team.
Test-driver
live · scheduledoptimus / test-driver
An agent that walks a feature end-to-end, captures evidence, scores severity, and writes the run manifest back into nexus_items. Runs on a weekly LaunchAgent or on demand — and dogfoods itself by walking the test-drive UI.
Nexus
16 types · in productionoptimus / nexus
A universal world-context primitive. 16 composable ContextTypes (docs, stories, plans, git history, goals, daily notes, calendar, memory, …) sit in one table, cross-linked, embedding-aware. One query language, every source.
Recent writing
Notes from the build. Updated as I ship.
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Anatomy of a Spec
The series kept insisting you need a spec. None of it told you how to write one. Here's the anatomy — the parts most specs are missing, the altitude problem that's the actual craft, and the test that tells you it's done.
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Garbage In, Gospel Out: Agentic Cognitive Bias
Humans have confirmation bias — we read new evidence as support for the hypothesis we already hold. Agents have it worse, because they can't tell where a 'fact' in their context came from. Once something false enters the window, every next token treats it as gospel. That's context poisoning, and it's the failure mode underneath most agent train wrecks.
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Orchestration
A spec you write and walk away from is a New Year's resolution. The hard part isn't defining intent — it's keeping it in force: guardrails that hold the line, a workflow that drives the spec, a plan that outlives the session, and drift detection that catches the gap.