starting the self-improving system that builds companies.
in 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.
counts are ideas currently at that stage or past it. the 76 killed left at every stage, so they are shown beside the funnel rather than under it — the pipeline does not keep per-stage exit history yet.
david — policy. the founder makes taste calls, kill decisions, and the bets that need a human gut.
claude — operations. architecting and building solutions. landing pages in minutes. mvps in hours. deep analysis on demand. scheduled routines push ideas through the pipeline while nobody is watching.
the subagents — specialisation. researchers, read-only probes, scorers, and an adversarial critic whose only job is to argue against the plan before anything expensive gets committed.
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.
the system is live and improves a dozen times a day. let's talk.