Surfboard Makers

We are a small team that builds deployment software, and we use AI tools extensively to do it. Poke around our repos and you’ll find a CLAUDE.md file right there in the root, sitting alongside a homepage that says “human-centric.” We don’t think that’s a contradiction, and we’d like to explain why.

The Surfboard Maker

Imagine a surfboard maker. She loves surfing - the craft of shaping a board, the thrill of catching a wave, the community at the beach. That’s why she got into this work.

The ocean right now is choppy. Big swells, shifting currents, undertow you can’t always see. For surfers, choppy water is a mixed bag: uncertainty, yes, but also some of the biggest waves anyone’s ever seen. It’s a hell of a time to be a surfer.

But not everybody’s focused on the waves. Some people are watching the water itself, asking harder questions. Who owns the beach? Who’s polluting the water? What happens to the ecosystem when the currents shift this fast? How do we make sure everybody has access to surf, not just people who can afford the gear?

The surfboard maker has thought about this. She knows what happens if the systems that support surfing break down. Neglecting them could kill the thing she loves.

She’s a surfboard maker, but she’s also a citizen of the beach. She goes to work, she shapes boards, she rides waves - and she doesn’t pretend that her craft exists in a vacuum.

That’s us. We’re surfboard makers. We build deployment tools for small teams because we are a small team, and we know what it feels like when your tools let you focus on the work instead of fighting the infrastructure. Shipping something to people who find it genuinely useful, iterating on it together, watching it get better - that’s catching the wave.

Big Waves

We are a handful of people building infrastructure software. The work we do - container orchestration, distributed state, controller reconciliation - requires deep understanding of systems. AI doesn’t replace that understanding. But it removes friction around it.

Our posture is: try it for everything. Can it help us write design docs? Capture notes? Make diagrams? Write code? Review code? Sometimes it’s magical. Sometimes it’s hilariously wrong. Sometimes it’s frustratingly inconsistent. We experiment and we adjust. Overall, it’s making us faster, and enabling a small team to explore far more ideas than we otherwise could.

But speed isn’t the point. The question we keep coming back to - with AI, with Miren, with all of our tools - is: is this helping humans build and communicate with other humans? When the answer is yes, we keep going. When it’s not, we back off.

This is also why Miren exists. Our entire product is built on the belief that AI enables small teams to ship more software than ever, and that software needs to go somewhere. We’re trying to build a business around that - we won’t pretend otherwise. It’s early, and our actions over time will say more than any blog post.

The Work Is Ours

There’s a real concern behind the skepticism, and it’s worth naming: a lot of AI-generated code is bad. Slung out without understanding, without review, without taste. We get why people see “AI-assisted” and think “AI-generated slop.”

Craft is understanding what you’re building and why. That doesn’t change when you pick up a new tool. When AI helps us write a controller or a migration, the understanding is still ours - and so is the responsibility. We read it, test it, and judge it. We don’t catch everything - nobody does. But we build software that’s easy to change, so when something slips through we fix it, we learn from it, and we write the test.

The most important things we make are the design documents we write for each other. RFDs that lay out the shape of the system, the ideas we’re considering, the decisions we’ve made and why. AI might help us draft them, but their purpose is to capture and convey human thinking. They’re written for humans first. The fact that AI tools can also read them and use that context to help us build is a nice byproduct, not the point.

We think about Miren itself the same way. LLMs are in the mix. Container technology is in the mix. But none of that is the point. The point is taking something from a builder, presenting it to a user, and making that feedback loop as smooth as possible. The technology serves the connection between humans - not the other way around.

What We Pay Attention To

We’re not oceanographers. We’re not going to write a white paper on AI governance. But “we just build tools” isn’t a position we’re interested in. We want to be citizens of this community, not just consumers of it. We’re still figuring out what that looks like in practice.

We’ve worked at small companies and large ones. We believe smaller teams can stay truer to their values - the bigger you get, the more the forces of growth dilute the original vision. The fact that small teams are able to do more in this wave of technology means there’s more potential than ever to stay small and stay focused. That’s something worth protecting.

The frontier AI tools are a case in point. They come from companies that are clearly chasing growth, clearly subject to the forces that growth brings into play. We don’t love being tethered to the whims of a large company to get the benefits of AI. But we’re building for teams that use these tools - we want to understand them firsthand, not theoretically.

At the same time - in the same way that we built Miren to run on nearly any computer, not locked to any one cloud vendor - we’re paying close attention to the progress of more open, locally controlled AI tools. The instinct is the same: don’t build a dependency you can’t walk away from.

We’re Still Surfers

We don’t have this all figured out. Nobody does. We’re out here learning alongside everyone else, feeling the tensions and contradictions, eyeing up which waves feel surfable and which ones feel dangerous. We’ve taken some spills already, and we’re certain we’ll take more.

But we know who we are. A small team that loves building software, building for other small teams who love building software. The waves are big right now, and we’re not going to sit on the beach and watch.