Make it work.
No model in sight. Software that holds up, which is its own discipline.
About
I build in layers. Some products carry no AI at all. They just need to work, and doing that well is its own discipline. In others, AI does the unglamorous part: capturing information a person would otherwise miss, and synthesizing it faster than they could by hand. Useful, but still incremental.
The layer I care about most is different. It asks whether AI lets you do something that was never possible before, something that changes the shape of the product instead of its speed.
Early artificial-heart developers spent years building pumps that mimicked the heart's rhythmic beat, partly because they believed that pulse was necessary for long-term circulatory support. It turned out blood doesn't need a pulse. It just needs to flow, and tissue absorbs what it needs regardless of rhythm. Once someone stopped assuming the replacement had to look like the original, the beating disappeared entirely.
I look for that same opening in software: not how to do the old thing faster, but whether the old thing needs to work this way at all.
I also build with local models, sized to the smallest one that will actually run the job on someone's typical machine, for tasks that need real privacy or can't carry a cost per use, like reading a folder of screenshots or restructuring files. Models keep improving, and some of what I build is aimed at where the model will be in a year, not where it is today. Whether open-weight models running locally end up mattering to that future, I don't know yet. Further out is physical AI, where the category itself is still being invented.
Different problems call for different layers. Matching the depth of the tool to the depth of the problem is the actual skill.
We're always looking for good ideas. If something in your week keeps costing you time or money and nobody has built the fix, write in and tell us about it. The writing, the research and everything still in progress live at byzyb.ai.
If something we made isn't doing what it promised, the address below reaches a person.
The layers
No model in sight. Software that holds up, which is its own discipline.
The unglamorous part, done faster than a person could by hand.
The shape of the product changes, not its speed.
The smallest model that will actually run the job on the machine in front of you.
Who runs it
I spent 28 years at EY, most recently as Global CTO and AI Officer for Client Technology and before that running its Enterprise Risk practice, and left the partnership in 2026 to build full time.
I studied AI at the University of Texas at Austin from 1988 to 1991, later ran and sold a security software company, and I still write code every day.
PainKiller Labs is where the things I build end up once other people can rely on them.