Friends
Friends
This page lists a handful of companies and organizations who I think are doing extra-outstanding work in the AI space. I meet a lot of Founders, and I have only ever met a handful who were making something that I truly believe will last.
Friends only make it onto this list if I actively want to use their stuff. I need to believe in it deep down or I just move on. All this stuff is legit.
I am formally advising some of these companies, with equity. Some are literally just buddies that I think are doing amazing work. The list is short on purpose and will grow slowly.
These cohere into a stack. Gas City is the platform layer, built on the Gas Town stack; Tessl works the agent layer on top of it, sharpening whatever agents you already run; and SkillBench sits up top with the people, tracking whether your engineers are actually getting better. SageOx isn't really a layer — it's a hardware hive mind, a bet down at the silicon that runs alongside the agents rather than under them. That's what I mean by coherence: take on the whole stack and the pieces don't fight each other.
Gas City
I advise Gas City Inc in the same equity-bearing capacity as SageOx and Tessl. The company is Chris Sells and Julian Knutsen's, built on top of the Gas Town stack. Chris scaled Flutter's developer community at Google from 100K to 3M; Julian was CTO at CashApp (Block / Square) and one of the original architects of the Wasteland federation model. They recently shipped v1.0.
SageOx
I'm a formal advisor to SageOx. They are building a hardware-assisted hive mind — an architectural bet not many people are making and one I find genuinely interesting.
SkillBench
SkillBench is co-founded by Dr. Matt Beane, author of The Skill Code (HarperCollins, 2024) and one of the leading researchers on apprenticeship and skill development in work involving intelligent machines. His work explains much of what's quietly broken about how people build expertise on the job today — and why AI is widening the gap between the people who keep growing and the ones who stall.
SkillBench is Matt's working answer. It reads real work — starting with software engineering, where the signal is richest: commits, diffs, PR review behavior, chat — and maps the organization as a task graph: who does what, which tasks AI can now absorb, and where that opens capacity to recompose roles. Leaders get an executive dashboard showing how AI is actually reshaping what their people can do, and where to reorganize around it. SkillBench has big news coming soon...
Tessl
Tessl is Guy Podjarny's company — he founded Snyk and built it into the developer-security category — now building toward AI-native development: moving software from a code-centric model to a spec-centric one, and giving coding agents the structured, versioned context they need to build and maintain it.
I am captivated by Tessl's agent, which operates in a space where
everyone has a need and nobody's thinking about solving it: an agent that
makes all your other agents do better. Think of it as a formal advisor
that's auditing your workflows, finding ways to improve your workers,
no matter what models, harnesses, and frameworks you're using.
Lord knows Gas Town could use this! It's like the /insights
Claude command on mega-steroids.
I signed on as a formal advisor with Tessl in June 2026.