Building in public

After two months of building Fabritorio, I finally “launched” the project. By launch of course I mean setting the repo visibility from “private” -> “public”, posting in r/LocalLLaMA and calling it a day.

The problem

Around October last year I built a new PC. The idea was to use it mostly to catch up with some AI stuff with a bit of gaming on the side. Long story short, the gaming won and it was used 90% of the time to play games.

Most of my AI usage is in agentic coding and the open models are unfortunately not there yet. Beyond that I didn’t have any other use case for agents. Or so I thought until I tried setting up OpenClaw earlier this year. I have a lot of processes that I just do daily, partly thanks to ADHD, but mostly I just like systems. So seeing the ease of talking to an agent and setting up an automated workflow after half an hour captivated my engineering itch.

The biggest friction with setting up agents is just always starting from scratch. You have to create some sort of small harness, create the tools, wire it up, adjust, and so on and so forth. So like any sane engineer I wanted to spend months of my time to automate something that could’ve just taken me weeks instead.

So I started hacking, first sparring on how to make it as “live” as possible. I wanted to move away from the workflow based state of available toolings, where you draw something and then click “play”. I want it to exactly feel like Factorio, you are wiring things live, and steering far away from looking like any low-code / no-code tool. Although in the end I wasn’t able to get that, it’s a good middleground.

What’s next

I’m still quite proud of how it turned out in the end. Now it’s time to put it to use and dog food, while also building in public. Not sure how often I can keep up this updates, writing isn’t really my strongest suit, just trying to make it a habit.