I've built so much. And I still feel stuck.

I guess I'm having a hard time figuring out where to go these days. The ideas are there, they always are, but as soon as I pick one, I start thinking about the other things I've already built that are just sitting there. SendVia Chat, Freelance Fast... and my mind goes: okay, I can build this one too. Then who's going to use it?

With Spectre, for example, I really believed in it. I saw this huge possibility in the framework and all the tools I was building around it. I thought it could make a real difference to how the industry uses agents. That sounds like a big claim now that I've written it down. But I believed it. While I was working on it, I believed it.

And now I'm rethinking its foundations. I'll get to that, because I'm already mixing up finding clients with doing research. They're even more mixed up in my head, anyway.

SendVia Chat, Freelance Fast, Vex Chat, BarcaVia Chat, the quoting tools built around SendVia, CRMs for specific businesses. And other ideas I tried to turn into something. In quite a few cases the product was there, you could use it. Very little response, though. I sent around a thousand emails to hundreds of companies, looked for contacts, made proposals. Put it in one sentence and it sounds quick, but there was a lot of work in there. A lot of hoping, too. Maybe this time someone will be interested. Maybe this company actually has the problem.

Often, nothing. And I keep wondering whether I got the product wrong, the person, the way I explained it. Maybe the problem matters much less to them than it does to me. Maybe they've already got some ugly workaround that does the job. The thing is, with so few replies I'm left guessing, and time keeps passing.

Then there's the work I'll have tomorrow. That worries me too. Finding clients feels harder, and I feel AI has something to do with it: more and more people can try building a page, an automation, a little piece of software themselves. Maybe what they get is enough for them. I use these tools. I know what they make possible, which is part of why I think about it so much.

Sometimes I get excited about some new thing they can do, and immediately after that I think: okay, that used to be something someone would have paid me for. Having both thoughts at once feels strange.

I'm trying to grow too, raise my level, move towards problems AI still struggles with. But it's a race. I start studying something and meanwhile it keeps moving, every year it seems to accelerate, almost exponentially, at least that's how it feels from here. Something difficult today might be ordinary soon. And I've put time into it. Should I have put that time somewhere else? Who knows. I wish I did.

With Spectre, I had a particularly strong conviction about the Governed Act Model. An agent can reason, make proposals, be capable of an awful lot, and then you need to decide what permissions it needs to actually do something. When it touches data, resources, other people's work, you need rules. I put so much into this idea. I saw a concrete way to deal with a problem that felt fundamental to me.

Then I started studying holons. I wanted to understand how to scale systems with lots of agents, how to organise them, how a group could work something like a mind while each agent still kept something of its own. Identity, cognition, the relationship between the part and the whole. And from there I started questioning pretty much everything, including where GAM belonged in the architecture.

I found myself looking for a cognitive Actor Model. Just explaining what I mean takes a lot of thinking, and meanwhile some answers I thought I had don't convince me anymore. There are individual ideas I really like. I try putting them together and something doesn't fit. So I change one piece, which changes the others too, and at some point I'm stuck.

That part is hard to admit. Because from the outside you might see the libraries, the articles, all the work, and right now there are things I don't really know how to move forward with.

Every now and then I tell myself I should focus on a smaller product, something concrete someone could use. And I think about SendVia again. Except I did try there too, you know. I looked for companies, thought about specific needs. Then you find yourself talking about advertising, distribution, how much you have to spend before you even know whether anyone's interested. I don't have that budget.

By the way, in the services I've tried to sell, AI is often an extra. The core is still messages, quotes, contacts, fairly ordinary parts of everyday work. If an AI feature helps, great, but the need should be there without it too. I'm saying this because now, whenever you present something, it feels like it gets thrown into the same pile as every other new tool coming out.

And the client has to trust you. I do understand that. If you hand over part of your work to someone you just found online, you want to know who's behind it, whether they'll still be there later, whether it's worth changing your habits. I can show you the software, the code, tell you what I've done. Trust takes time, though. I need to at least get the chance to build it.

I've put a lot of work into open source, partly to make my work visible, and I keep writing here. Some people read it, a few things happen. I hoped it would bring more opportunities too, more users. So far I'm struggling to really get the products going. Sometimes I think I need to write more, explain more, make another demo. Then I wonder how long I can keep doing that.

Right, time. That keeps coming up in the holon research too. Because I want to do it properly. You can write down an interesting idea in a few lines, then you have to work out how to test it, what experiments to run, what to compare it with. The data, the datasets, the measurements. I need to be able to tell when what I've imagined is wrong, too. And explain it well enough for somebody else to discuss it and check it.

I want to put it all together and get something that makes sense out of it. Instead, sometimes all I do is add another question. I feel a bit lost, yeah.

Meanwhile, online it looks like everyone has already figured out the next step. Every announcement is huge, every demo seems to change everything. There's so much hype I struggle to know what to believe, what's worth stopping to look at. And in the middle of that I'm supposed to get my own project in front of people, find users, help it grow. Just getting anyone to listen feels like a whole job.

I'm left with this feeling of being behind. Behind the research, behind the people building things, behind the people who already know how to sell what they build. Maybe I'm only seeing the part that's working for them, I know. But then I go back to my own stuff and I still feel it.

That's also why I sometimes struggle to sleep. I keep thinking about where all this is going, where to put the time I have, what I should build now. I start with a technical question and end up wondering what work I'll be doing in a few years. Then I go back to the technical question, because maybe solving it would help. My head keeps going round like that.

And the strange thing is, I like this progress. I like thinking about what humanity could do with tools like these. There are incredible possibilities, I use them myself, they still make me curious. I want to be part of all this and find a way to make a living in it too. That's where I'm struggling right now.

Maybe I've started too many things. Maybe I should have stuck with one longer, or talked to people earlier, or explained myself better. I do ask myself that. I don't think writing good code means the world owes me clients. But I'm a bit disappointed in myself too. I thought I'd have managed to take something further. And when enough attempts pile up like this, even starting the next one feels different.

I notice I'm back to talking about products again, but that's the mess, really. The research, the work, the future, the ideas. I should be able to keep them a bit separate, and instead one thing takes me straight to another.

Anyway, I'll keep working on it. Building, trying to understand these things. I still enjoy it too much, even feeling like this right now. When I try to picture a life where I feel fulfilled, I always end up here, building something. I find it hard to even imagine myself any other way.

I'd like to get one of these things far enough that someone comes back and uses it because they need it. Something that finally finds its place. In the meantime, I've still got quite a bit to sort out. That much is clear.