[email protected] Denver, CO
Paul Barrick
Building agentic systems and marketing infrastructure that ships in days, not quarters.
I build software with AI agents — Optimus (a context engine for engineering teams), the harness layer that lets it swap models, and a steady stream of musings on what changes when development becomes agentic.
What I'm shipping
Optimus and two of the components that make it more than a kanban tool.
Optimus
v0.9 · in productionoptimus
An agent-native engineering platform. Plans, stories, docs, git history, goals, and daily flow all live in one composable world-context engine — built so a small operator + a fleet of agents can ship like a large team.
Test-driver
live · scheduledoptimus / test-driver
An agent that walks a feature end-to-end, captures evidence, scores severity, and writes the run manifest back into nexus_items. Runs on a weekly LaunchAgent or on demand — and dogfoods itself by walking the test-drive UI.
Nexus
16 types · in productionoptimus / nexus
A universal world-context primitive. 16 composable ContextTypes (docs, stories, plans, git history, goals, daily notes, calendar, memory, …) sit in one table, cross-linked, embedding-aware. One query language, every source.
Recent writing
Notes from the oven. Check out what's cooking.
- The New Ways of Working
The New Caste System: Who's Drowning in Agentic Dev — and Where the Life Rafts Are
- Agentic Foundations
What Agentic Development Actually Is
- Agentic Engineering
The Review Is the Work Now
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Don't Just Give Your LLM Tools — Give It Systems
A tool bolts one capability onto one agent for one session. A system teaches every agent you'll ever connect. Here's the difference, and why the vault — not the tool list — is the real leverage.
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Acquiring Talent in the Age of AI
The interview became an open-book exam and everyone brought the book. Companies are responding by trying to catch the AI — banning tools, dragging candidates back on-site. They're solving the wrong problem. The job changed; the test didn't.
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Leading the Change
You can't org-chart your way through this. Leading the agentic shift is empathy first, foundation second, language third — in that exact order. Skip the first and you lose people; skip the second and you scale chaos; skip the third and no one can reason together.