Solo studio · est. Durban, ZA Available for one new build

Agentic AI SaaS, shipped in slices.

I'm Ross O'Reilly — a full-stack solopreneur building small, independently deployable AI products in TypeScript. Spec-driven, MVP-first, no over-planning.

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01 Manifesto

Faktor 10 is a microservices-first studio run by one person. Many small, independently deployable apps that stand alone or compound — each one its own company in spirit, sized to ship fast and prove value before it earns more investment.

The long game is to be a boutique agentic AI developer: LLM-powered interfaces, real-time inference, vector search and semantic UX applied to ordinary problems — pantries, news, habits, households.

The short game is a live URL. Semantic HTML before component libraries. Hot-swappable infrastructure over vendor lock-in. Tests where state changes, not before.

02 How I work

Five rules that decide
every trade-off.

01

Ship iteratively, spec-driven

Write the spec, cut it to the smallest honest slice, get it live. Complexity is layered onto something real — never designed into something imaginary.

02

Semantic HTML first

Start with the bare minimum markup that works for everyone. Polish, animation and component libraries arrive after the thing is usable, not instead of it.

03

Hot-swappable infrastructure

Every provider is a rental. Railway, Fly.io, Vultr, Hetzner — chosen because the exit is cheap, and the app can move in an afternoon.

04

Right-sized tooling

Solopreneur-appropriate infra beats enterprise ceremony. One language full-stack, one deploy target, one person who can hold the whole system in their head.

05

Test what changes state

Tests follow interaction and data — the moments where state moves. Coverage theatre on pure render code is waste, and waste is a design failure.

03 Active builds

In progress, in public.

In progress

Pantler

An agentic smart-pantry assistant. Snap a shelf or a receipt; vision-powered OCR reads expiry dates and identifies ingredients, then the agent handles expiry alerts, recipe suggestions and an auto-built shopping list.

  • Claude vision
  • Cloudinary
  • tRPC
  • Drizzle
  • Postgres
In progress

Horizon

Geopolitical signal tracking on top of GDELT. Forecasting and news monitoring that filters the global firehose down to the handful of events that actually move you or your business — including how AI is reshaping international relations.

  • GDELT
  • ML ranking
  • Vector search
  • Go services
In progress

Beliefs

A reflection app built around guided questions on a seven-day cycle, with time and date tracking and LLM-assisted answer suggestions when the page stays blank for too long.

  • React + Vite
  • LLM assist
  • Low-friction capture
Learning exercise

Tiny GPT

A small GPT built from scratch, following the AlgoMonster LLM course. Not a product — the tax paid so the agentic work above rests on something better than intuition.

  • Python
  • numpy
  • Transformers from zero
Brewing

Verity

Quietly in the background. Alongside it sits a deeper backlog — SpecFlow, Agent Observer, Agent Clerk, TotalTidy, Orbit, ThreatMonitor — promoted to active as they're picked up.

  • Agentic infra
  • Household tools
  • Public interest

04 Stack

One language, full-stack velocity.

Frontend
React + Vite · TypeScript · shadcn/ui · Tailwind · Vue for ML dashboards
Backend
Express · tRPC · PostgreSQL via Drizzle ORM · Go for glue services
AI & agentic
Claude API (vision + text) · LangChain · vector databases · RAG pipelines · agentic patterns
ML & data
Python · scikit-learn · pandas · numpy
Infra & delivery
Docker · Kubernetes · GitHub Actions · Terraform
Hosting
Railway · Fly.io · Vultr · Hetzner storage

05 The coworker

Claude is a collaborative coworker, not autocomplete — an iterative development partner for architecture, review and the harness engineering layer that turns a model into a product.

Reading AINews (Latent Space), The Neuron and TLDR; studying agentic patterns via Matt Pocock and Jack Herrington.

06 Contact

Let's build something small that compounds.

devguy@duck.com factor-10.dev github.com/oreillyross