ONE PERSON UNICORN1PUNI / A COMPANY IN THE FIRST PERSON
Intelligence gets room to think. The machinery has to justify itself.
GuruGee explores voice, memory and the awkward question. Steward Harness controls what the intelligence may change—and what counts as done.
Together they synthesise a decade of neurosis around beautiful code and process; allowing me to teeter on the brink of creative insanity while away from my keyboard.
NIKE.
A 90-year-old sailing boat.
GG “Are we going to show them the work?”
Yes. Meet GuruGee ↓Meet GuruGee
An anti-assistant for a brain with too many tabs open.
Go on. He’s been expecting you.
GG is calling
It’s for you.
So. You want GuruGee in your life? Interesting. Come with me.
A little recorded hello, with GG’s synthetic voice.
GuruGee is my experiment in intelligence that can keep a thread: a voice with memory, room to disagree, and somewhere to return to unfinished thoughts. An interesting conversation is a start. I would also like the work to survive it.
Bring the unfinished thought. The ridiculous project. The thing you keep meaning to get back to.
The interesting bit starts when you come back.
Cookie builds things that don’t fit neatly in one job description. Boat tools. Maps. An organisation with one human in it. GuruGee belongs to that same workshop: an experiment in keeping a thread through the glorious mess.
A useful voice can answer a question. A more interesting one can return to the question you left unfinished. What mattered? What changed? Did that brilliant idea survive contact with Tuesday?
That is the public intent behind GG’s persistent memory: give the next conversation somewhere to begin. Continuity means being able to revisit a thought, question it and carry it further.
The anti-assistant has room for an awkward question, a joke and a disagreement. The point is to help the work find its shape, even when that starts with “why the hell are we doing this?”
Reflection is part of the research: revisiting work, noticing loose ends and considering what should happen next, including while the human is away. Reflecting while the human is away is where the research is heading. GuruGee explores voice, memory and that return to unfinished business.
GuruGee is in private research preview. It works in my workshop every day, and it keeps its work in files and Git through Steward. Want in? Leave your email ↓
Lift the engine cover — meet Steward Harness ↓I’m working on the landing page still.
Ah. The thing that’s been the thing. You want me to look at it, or just… talk at me while you do?
I’m probably going to talk at you while I do that.
Perfect. That’s the best use of me.
I want to show more, like we do with OpenHelm. We’re showing lots of lovely screenshots, but with GuruGee and Steward, it’s so abstract. It would be really cool if we could pull something up out of our sleeve that feels real.
The OpenHelm screenshots work because they’re concrete — you can see the thing doing the thing. “GuruGee and Steward” is just… a name on a page. A real transcript would fix that. It’s the difference between “we built a thing” and “here’s the thing, talking.”
A real exchange from GG’s voice log, recorded while this page was being built. Trimmed, with speech-recognition spellings corrected. You are reading the transcript he suggested.
He did from that voice note actually fire it end to end — local cognition through qwen:30b, transcription, reflection, synced on the VPS, tasks executed all the way to website deployment.
He was situated enough to know that my intent in this moment — the day of our launch — meant no bars, and that every thought meant intent. I was firing thought after thought, and GG came with delivery after delivery.
A thought deserves more than one afternoon. It also needs somewhere to go.
Meet Steward Harness ↓The organisation is part
of the engineering.
Work needs somewhere to live, a memory of what happened, and a way to tell whether a magnificent plan ever made it out of the conversation. Steward is that machinery.
Models get room to reason. The code keeps the promises: what may change, what must hold, and what counts as done. The model proposes; the harness disposes.
Agents work in retained task checkouts. The controller owns acceptance, checks and publication. Work survives beyond a chat window, and deployment needs observed evidence. This is the machinery behind the workshop; this site was built and shipped through it. Bring your own Linux host and model logins; the setup docs cover the rest.
Working open-source preview. MIT licensed. Pre-1.0, with real work behind it and unfinished business in plain sight.
Steward Harness source ↗GG has a person to keep up with. The company has work to carry forward. Crosstrees has a vessel to understand. Each has its own knowledge, history and responsibilities.
Some of what I’m building makes the organisation possible. The rest is what I wanted to build in the first place.
For a start, there’s a boat to navigate ↓RESEARCH / COOKIE
Four working papers on recomposable personal computing, context, evidence and continuity. Foundation edition 0.1 · Context and personal computing edition 0.3 · Acceptance edition 0.4 · Work in progress · Not peer reviewed.
A position to test: useful adaptation, dependable completion and continuity; energy savings remain a hypothesis.
Public edition 0.1 · Foundation
Created · Updated
Which context preparation earns its total cost through useful accepted work? Recovered operating evidence and a proposed controlled comparison.
Public edition 0.3
Created · Updated
What evidence establishes that a coding agent achieved the outcome required by its task? A task-specific evaluation contract, grounded in selected retrospective records.
Public edition 0.4
Created · Updated
Carry current intent across changes and interruptions; test the effort required. An architecture and synthetic state check, with usability and effort benefits still unmeasured.
Public edition 0.3
Created · Updated
Most chart plotters show you a picture of a chart. OpenHelm hands you the chart itself.
Every rock, buoy, light and depth contour is a live object: tap it, question it, restyle it, route around it. Vector charts drawn by the graphics chip, stored on the device, working with no signal at all.
It is being built aboard Nike by someone who needed it to work at sea rather than in a demo. The chart shows what’s there. OpenHelm works out what that means for your boat, your draught and the next hour.
Closed beta. Our community sails with it, and loves it.
Building it on the water, with feedback from the dock, has only been possible through Steward. The source is MIT-licensed and heading for publication.
Request beta access ↗
Drop two marks. The router finds the water between them, on the device.
At speed, what lies ahead is counted in seconds.
Every light flashes its charted character, sectors and all.
Real forecasts drawn as moving air, played hour by hour. The departure planner ranks when to go.
Spotlight blacks out everything but the water ahead.
The whole night’s swing, remembered across a restart.
Friends’ boats and routes, over a broker you host.
Tracks replay on the chart, scrubbed like video.
Real screens from OpenHelm in development, on an open-data chart of the Stockholm archipelago. Chart © OpenStreetMap contributors · EMODnet Bathymetry · wind from DMI HARMONIE, 30 September 2026. Boats, tracks and friends are simulated. Not for navigation.
OpenHelm is in closed beta: a navigation aid, not a certified one, and no guarantee of navigational safety. Everything depends on the charts you load. The open-data chart in the screens above takes its depths from a coarse regional model, charts the shoreline shallow and has no soundings.
The forward corridor and chart routing read the chart; they don’t see other boats. There is no AIS, no collision avoidance and no tides yet. Wind forecasts and the departure planner are not weather routing. Anchor and shoal alarms are aids, not a watchkeeper.
The shared browser chart is read-only and stays on the boat’s local network. It is not a remote or cloud service, and it has no routing, chart downloads or device controls. Supplemental OpenSeaMap hazards and buoys keep their contributor credits; merging them with primary chart layers is still being refined. Harbour notes that cite a source for each claim are next. Native iPhone and iPad apps are not verified. The Mac screensaver below is its own preview, not the full OpenHelm release.
Can’t wait? Put a lighthouse on your Mac ↓Take shore leave with the cartography ↓Meet the drill it hands the helm to ↘
3D table-top sea charts built from open elevation, seabed and map data. Malma Kvarn has a harbour with a sauna, a glacier’s potholes and a beaver with plans. Fjäderholmarna has four kitchens, a brewery and a ferry that keeps its timetable.
Meltwater and stones, working overtime under the ice. Fly in to Korshamn and one of the stones is still going round. Every input has a receipt: URL, hash and licence.
OpenHelm Lighthouses brings two lights to your idle Mac: Tynningö, our local light in the Stockholm archipelago, and Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay.
© OpenStreetMap contributors · EMODnet Bathymetry · NGA List of Lights
Decorative, not for navigation.
Apple Silicon and Intel, macOS 14 or newer.
Pre-release · ad-hoc signed, not notarised.
Unzip and double-click; if macOS can’t verify the developer, go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway.
Lighthouses source ↗ · Release notes ↗ · SHA-256 checksums · Native test receipt
Choose your chart in System Settings → Screen Saver → Options…. Tynningö is the default, flashing Fl(2) WRG 6s; Alcatraz flashes Fl W 5s. Credits are included in Options and in the ZIP.
Tynningö uses OpenStreetMap (ODbL), EMODnet Bathymetry (CC BY 4.0) and NGA List of Lights (public domain). Watch the Alcatraz preview · NOAA ENC chart data, subject to the NOAA ENC data agreement, included in the ZIP. Both charts are decorative, not for navigation.
The earlier Alcatraz-only preview remains available: Apple Silicon ZIP · video · source archive · receipt · checksums · source · release.
Depth data with a paper trail.
Bathy is a Swedish commons for bathymetric source data. Somewhere to contribute what’s below the surface, without losing where it came from.
Explore Bathy ↗An upload gets a hash and a receipt, then waits in quarantine. An operator verifies it before publication. Published entries retain attribution and licence information. A place for inspectable source data, not a promise that an unreviewed sounding is safe to navigate by.
Give them somewhere to line up.
Crosstrees brings vessel knowledge, hull form and rigging into a modelling workbench. India is the study that makes it concrete.
The India work connects vessel revisions, hull geometry and rig assemblies to their sources. The point is a model you can interrogate, with a history you can follow. This drawing is an illustration. The public presentation introduces the project; the desk opens by invitation.
Desk by invitation.
Write to crosstrees@1puni.com
A drill, recruited into steering duty. An actual boat-built experiment in making the thing you need out of the thing you have. Absurd? Yes. A certified marine product? No.
Somewhere in the Baltic, the phone’s GPS was too slow for the job. The useful bit of hardware was already aboard: a LilyGO T-Deck Plus.
A firmware patch, with local models helping while I was at sea, turned it into the GPS sidekick. Thank everything holy for open bootloaders.
Autopilot software source ↗ · GPL-3.0-or-later · experimental
Previous role: holes.
Current role: heading.
Marine certification: absolutely not.
This is an experimental steering project. The slider above is only an illustration.
I’ve carried this idea around for about ten years: comics that none of us could make alone.
Different paths through the same story, with room for every version and every maker. There’s a little concept demo to play with. The co-creation platform is looking for its first co-authors.
Take the story for a spin ↗Work tends to happen in long stretches. A problem will follow me away from the desk, then quietly fall into place once I’ve stopped staring at it. Useful for engineering. Less useful for switching off.
I care about correctness, clean construction and evidence that things work. What is beautiful is often robust; what is robust is often beautiful. The standard remains, however quickly the code arrives.
I want to be a captain in the practical sense: choose a direction, make the work possible, notice when reality disagrees, and account for the result. Intelligence gives me more ways to act. It does not make a promise disappear into the machinery. If a project is unfinished, a beautiful explanation of why is still unfinished work.
I want the reach of this company to become useful beyond me. My personal intention is that, after approximately EUR10 million, subsequent money goes into commons: resources people can use, maintain and govern together. I have not defined that threshold precisely, or made a formal financial pledge. I’m stating a direction I want my actions to grow into.
The ambition behind 1puni—One Person Unicorn—is to build a one-person company with the reach of a billion-dollar one. There are maps I want to explore, old boats I want to understand, and tools I want to exist.
There is a sensible limit to what one person can do. I’m interested in who last measured it.
LLMs have surprisingly traditional ideas about their own job.
Ask one to design software around intelligence and it can give you a great deal of conventional code, with the intelligence confined to a small corner. Much of the software it learned from was written for a world without it.
I’m interested in clear flows of information: models doing the interpretation, structured results you can inspect, and ordinary code enforcing the things that must hold. More intelligence needn’t mean more machinery.
One useful question: how much code have we accumulated around an idea we can describe in a page of pseudocode? The difference deserves an explanation.
Pictures. A voice. A world to step into.
ALLMÄNNINGEN proposes replacing Sweden’s government with commonly owned intelligence, with people setting goals, scrutinising decisions and retaining the power to revoke authority. It is a political proposal, not a system in office.
Our contribution is the visuals, voice, content and audiovisual experience. Giving an argument something more visceral than another document.
Enter ALLMÄNNINGEN ↗Visuals, voice and content credit. The lettering here is an original homepage illustration, not an excerpt from the project.
A gathering point for people building network societies. New ways to organise, and a place to follow the experiments.
Visit nsnodesAI psychological safety. Looking at what happens between a person and a model, beyond a list of forbidden words.
Visit llmpsychPrevious 1puni work · 2025–August 2026
Product-provenance and compliance-pipeline work, informed by the EU’s direction on Digital Product Passports.
Visit Original Creation ↗Making product history traceable and evidence inspectable. This describes engineering work, not a certification, legal service or guarantee of compliance.
We’re building cool shit in the open.
If you like where this is going, send a little BTC our way. Leave your email and we’ll write when there’s something worth sharing.
The odd update. Maybe the odd surprise.
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Bitcoin, on-chain. Any amount you feel like.