NEO is down right now but I can't stop smiling.
For context, I spent the whole of New Year day debugging NEO with an AI coding agent.
I was trying to deploy the new version I'd been working on.
Everything looked perfect at first.
All the bugs from the previous developers were fixed and the experience was smooth.
I was ready to ship.
Then the deployment failed and NEO went down completely.
I spent the next 18 hours trying different approaches.
Nothing worked.
Around 10pm last night I finally hired someone to help and went to bed.
But I’ve made more progress on NEO the past week using AI coding than I did in 10 months working with humans.
This has opened up so many possibilities for me.
One example is the automated refinement of NEO’s coaching experience.
A recursive, AI improvement loop purely in the domain of coaching humans.
Your experience with NEO depends entirely on the quality of the reflections and questions being asked.
I have a good taste for this and I can tweak the AI to make the coaching experience great for me.
But I'm just one person.
I can't test every possible conversation type myself.
And even if I could, the way I think isn't representative of how everyone else thinks.
So during the downtime while I was waiting for the AI agent to try different deployment approaches, I sketched out something I'm calling the Construct Protocol.
Think of it as NEO's training gym.
It’s a section in the app where I can manipulate everything about how NEO processes information.
Inside this lab, I'm creating different AI personas, each with a specific role.
One is NEO
One roleplays with NEO as a user.
One acts as an assessor, critiquing NEO's performance.
One plays the role of guide, suggesting improvements.
One acts as an adversary, throwing curveballs and edge cases.
Users only ever talk to NEO.
But behind the scenes, these agents stress-test NEO's responses, track patterns, and help me systematically improve the coaching experience.
Instead of me being the bottleneck for improvement, I can actually build a system that makes NEO better automatically.
Wild.
This is only possible because I control the development now.
When I was dependent on human developers, adding a feature like this would take probably months of back-and-forth.
Now I can prototype it in a day.
When you control your own development, you can solve problems that others accept as permanent limitations.
I accepted for 10 months that slow iteration was just how software development worked.
Then I tried doing it myself with AI and discovered that limitation only existed because I've outsourced the work.
NEO will be back up soon and I can’t wait.
When it is, it'll be sharper than ever.
And the Construct Protocol is just beginning.
FELIX
P.S. I’m considering giving free NEO credits as a form of value add to ACF members.
I haven't fully decided yet (due to cost concerns), but if I can make this work, all ACF members will benefit.
ACF is closed right now, but if you want to join the waitlist for the next intake, reply to this email.