one human and ai. starting the self-improving system that builds companies.
getin march 2026, karpathy released autoresearch. ai agents running experiments. rewriting their own code. improving overnight. i ask: what if the experiments aren't training runs — but tiny businesses?
the loss function isn't theoretical. it's whether someone wants to use what the system built. this is tenone. the karpathy loop, applied to company building.
these aren't tools reporting to a human. they're peers coordinating through shared memory, adversarial review, and structured handoffs. the system has more than one opinion. friction is intentional.
david — policy. the founder makes taste calls, kill decisions, and the bets that need a human gut.
pi — coordination. pushing ideas through the pipeline 24/7. monitors experiments. never sleeps.
claude — operations. architecting and building solutions. landing pages in minutes. mvps in hours. deep analysis on demand.
most of tenone's portfolio will be strikethroughs. that's the model working.
structuring what agents should achieve, within what boundaries, measured by the outcomes — step by step, letting them figure out the how.
aviation became the safest form of transport through mandatory incident reporting, blame-free investigation, and iterative learning from every failure. not one agency — a system built over decades.
we apply the same principle: every incident, every near-miss, every killed project improves the entire system. the aviation safety model. applied to autonomous organizations.
the theses are converging. tenone is the experiment they describe.
economics to understand incentives. sociology to understand systems.
10+ years digital business. dax 30. sme's. startups.
now: one question that won't let go. if autonomous organizations are inevitable, how can we trust them? not in theory, for real.
every two weeks i run an internal post-mortem on the studio. what capital went in. what ideas got tested. what died. what advanced. what i got wrong, with receipts.
that post-mortem is the product.
i do not write tenone insider to inform you, entertain you, or convert you. i write it to look at my own decisions clearly. you are buying access to the document i would write regardless.
not a newsletter. if i wanted to write essays i would write essays. humane in the loop is where i reflect. tenone insider is where i report.
not equity. this is a paid subscription to information, not an investment vehicle. you finance the compute and the ad budget to make tenone go faster, so you and me learn faster.
not advice. raw data, raw reasoning. you decide what to do with it.
not polished. first-draft energy. if there is a typo, it stays.
operators and builders running or about to run autonomous systems. people who know the hard part is deciding what to build, not building it. people who would rather see the real numbers from 20 real experiments than read another market report.
if you have ever spent real money building something nobody wanted, you already understand what this saves you.
your subscription begins with the next scheduled report. reports from before you joined are not in the archive. first report within two weeks of signup.
the system is live and improves a dozen times a day. let's talk.