Over the last few months I started three projects outside Softerize. They already have websites, and one already has a release. Before anyone asks whether I changed careers: I did not. Softerize is still my main business — and, for now, the only real one. The other three are bets. This post covers what each one is, where it stands, and why I decided to do this now.

Why now

In The Cost of Decisions in Software I wrote that the real cost of a decision is not in implementing it, but in correcting it. When being wrong is expensive, people stop deciding.

That holds for new projects too. For a long time, testing a product idea meant months of work before the first answer from the market — and if the answer was "no", those months went with it. That math has changed. With AI in the development workflow, getting to a first version that works takes a fraction of the time. Being wrong became cheap enough to be worth trying.

So I am trying. With clear limits: each project starts small, with a well-defined problem, and only grows if someone other than me cares about it.

Comitiva

Comitiva is agentic chat for your whole team, in a Slack-style app. You connect any LLM — with an API key (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Ollama) or through the CLI you already use, like Claude Code and Codex — and give each agent a role and a set of tools: local folders, Google Drive, any MCP server.

The part I like most is permissions. Reading inside an agent's folders happens without asking; any write stops the run and asks: allow, deny or always allow. And it is not a coding tool — the example agents are a researcher, a writer, a reviewer and an organizer.

Stage: v0.1 is out for macOS, Windows and Linux, open source under Apache-2.0, at github.com/comitiva-dev/comitiva. The team hub is built, but not in the release yet.

ShellTasks

ShellTasks keeps each project's context — endpoints, env vars, commands, credentials — in typed #packs, and puts all of it one command away from your shell with the tsk CLI: tsk get, tsk env and tsk exec bring pack values into your shell, scripts and .env files.

Secret fields are encrypted on the device before syncing; the server only stores ciphertext. It also comes with a keyboard-first todo list, where each todo can point to a pack.

Stage: pre-launch, with the waitlist open. Unlike the other two, this one is a paid product — there is a free plan for a single machine, and Pro and Team plans for sync and teams.

Abyssurd

Abyssurd is the outlier: an indie studio making cozy, goofy games for the whole family. It has nothing to do with foodservice or developer tools, and that is exactly why it is here.

Stage: in development. The first games are in the oven.

What does not change

Softerize is still where my main work, the team and the clients are. Nothing above competes with that — and if it ever does, the decision is already made.

What changes is that there is more to talk about now. As each project moves, I will write about it here: the ShellTasks beta launch, Abyssurd's first game, what I learn putting Comitiva in the hands of real teams. All three are also in the Projects section of the home page, with each one's stage kept up to date.