About

Creators are becoming builders. The tools got good enough that someone with real expertise and no engineering team can make the thing they know should exist — and then has to find out whether it works for anyone but them.

SQUAT is one instance of that story. It exists because its own creator hit exactly that wall.

From the founder

I'm a creator who became a builder, because the tools I needed didn't exist.

The thing nobody tells you about building alone with agents is how fast the system gets complicated. You ship quickly, and then one day it's large enough that you can't hold it in your head, and the problems stop being visible. Not broken builds — those you catch. The quiet kind: the flow that technically works and that no actual person could get through.

So I built something to check. It began with the narrowest possible question: did I break it in the last build?

Then I wanted more. I wanted to send someone in with a goal and no instructions and watch what happened — can you figure out how to use this? — because that's how people really use software. That question turned out to be far more powerful than the first one, and no test harness can ask it.

And then the one underneath both: before I build anything, what do people make of the idea? That's the deepest reach, and it's the piece still being built, because it has to be right before it ships.

Every round of my own products runs through SQUAT. It's both my QA and my proof.

— Eric Duell

Who this is for

Someone people are depending on, who feels it. A solo builder, or the principal of a small agency — different-sized shops, same weight.

And they don't necessarily look like the founder mythology. Garage, dorm room, small band of technically-minded guys — that story was always incomplete, and it's out of date now. When the constraint stops being can you write the code and becomes do you know something worth building, the population of people who can build changes shape.

SQUAT is for whoever has the expertise.

SQUAT is a product of Elucidate Digital, part of Elucidate Ventures. Eric writes at ericduell.substack.com.