Field notes
The receipts blog. What is actually working as we build Figaro on a real brand — with the caveats kept honest.
- Aug 25, 2026
The Extraction Gauntlet: Separating the Product From Its First Tenant
How we split the product's own repository out of the private instance it grew up inside — three adversarial audit rounds, an object-database check that 'fresh git init' alone doesn't pass, and a denylist that is not allowed to name what it protects.
- Aug 25, 2026
The Month the System Graded Itself
A monthly operating report where both revenue bars were beaten — and the number that mattered was not the beat. It was that the machine graded the whole company as a system, and every row wore its source.
- Aug 15, 2026
30 Pages in an Afternoon: the Hours-Math of an AEO Pass
A seat built about thirty answer-engine-optimized pages for a client site in a single afternoon. The interesting number isn't the thirty — it's the specialist-weeks that afternoon replaced, and the one part that still needed a human.
- Aug 13, 2026
The Day the Counter Moved: Closed Loops 0 → 2
For weeks our closed-loop counter sat at zero on purpose — a promise we hadn't earned yet. On one day in August it moved to two: one bet graded a miss, one graded a hit. Here is why that day mattered more than either result.
- Aug 10, 2026
A 360° Product Video for About Eighty Cents
A rotating product video is a normal line item on a creative invoice. A seat produced one for the price of a vending-machine snack. The point isn't the eighty cents — it's what happens to a founder's creative budget when a whole class of asset stops costing money.
- Aug 10, 2026
We Read a Rival's Entire Library with Six Agents
A competitor had published roughly ninety-five articles. We wanted to understand the whole body of work, not skim it — so we pointed six agents at it in parallel and had a map by the afternoon. This is the method, minus the name-calling, as a demonstration of what a harness is for.
- Aug 10, 2026
The Day an Ad Sold a Sold-Out Bestseller
A live ad kept spending on a product that had quietly gone out of stock. Nobody caught it by looking harder — an inventory signal and an ad signal that had never been in the same room finally were. A small, real receipt for why the cross-department view is the whole idea.
- Jul 30, 2026
A guide is coming
Why we are publishing a field guide to running an e-commerce brand with AI agents — and what to expect from these field notes.