Tools worth keeping
The first afternoon with a new tool is easy to get excited about. You try the examples. Something that used to take an hour happens in a minute. You start thinking about everything you could do with it. The more useful question comes a week later: are you still reaching for it?
That is the question we want to keep asking at Aro. We are interested in software that becomes part of how you work. It has to survive the awkward cases: the half-finished project, the missing context, the change of plan halfway through a task. A good first impression only tells you so much.
AI makes this harder to judge. A convincing answer can arrive before you know whether it is right. An agent can make a large change faster than you can review it. Speed is useful, but the time you spend checking and undoing work belongs in the calculation too.
Consider a tool that changes a function in a codebase. We want to know which callers it checked, what assumptions it made, and whether it ran the relevant tests. If it could not run them, it should say so. Those details help someone decide whether to accept the change. A confident summary does not do that on its own.
We also want it to be easy to disagree with a tool. You should be able to interrupt a task, inspect the result, and take a different approach without starting from scratch. People change their minds while they work. Software should leave room for that.
These are some of the questions behind e, and they extend beyond coding agents. We want to explore them through other tools and experiments too. We do not expect every idea to become a product. Sometimes building something is how you find out that the idea was wrong, or that a much smaller version would be enough.
We will use this space to write about that work: decisions we are making, things we are trying, and problems we have not solved. The aim is to leave a useful record, including the parts that are still uncertain.
For now, we have a simple place to start. Build something, use it on real work, and see whether we want to open it again tomorrow.