OctoMY™ Supports Ukraine!
2025 has definitely been a year, and it is now coming to an end.
There has been some movement in the OctoMY™ project and things are looking very exciting for 2026. This project has lived mostly in my head for so many years and has gradually, through hard prioritization and even harder work transformed into a physical project in the real world. It was a slow and painstaking process of writing endless amounts of code, restructuring ideas, consolidating sparks of innovation. Carving fleeting insights into rock only for them to be shattered by the next realization. Over and over, relentlessly. I would give up from time to time, but every time I stepped away, I only gained more perspective, and I realized that I had made vital progress.
The scope was transformed from a naive vision through a heartless and cold barrage of realizations that my ambitions were not really feasible for any normal rational human being to take on alone without help from the outside. And yet I was too stubborn (and ignorant) to stop.
I pivoted to a more profitable side project in the hope of making the necessary money to fund a team to make OctoMY™ into a reality without sacrificing my ridiculous ambitions. Then, just as we were preparing to launch after 3 years of hard work, the war broke out in Ukraine. On top of this I had some major tax related financial issues that completely removed any chance of launching the profitable side project.
I had to pivot again, this time to secure my personal finances for the benefit of my family. I managed to somehow recover, and as a bonus, my 3 years of work was not lost. It was revived and turned into something even greater. Together with my friend and business partner who invited me into his fabulous startup, it has now become a real product that might see some financial success at last.
In 2025, this has become more clear than ever and it is lookg great for 2026.
But this is not the only thing that came out of the ashes of the initial failed side project. The octomy.org website is now hosted from the platform that arose, and it holds a whole world of hope and promise for the OctoMY™ project in so many ways.
Like always, I will not spoil too much. I like to be able to keep my promises.
This is only the first part of the story, the second is more strange and unexpected. Some might say even ironic, given the nature of the OctoMY™ project as a robotics platform focusing on the interface between human beings and artificial intelligence. With the rapid evolution of LLMs, certain aspects of software development has been completely transformed. The speed increase with which experienced developers can churn out OK-ish code has completely transformed certain projects. OctoMY™ is no exception.
With the current rate of development, my search for a team is not put on hold, but it might not be as important as it was just a few months ago. It turns out that the two most difficult aspects of having an LLM be productive at writing code, namely the accumulation of a database of very relevant context, and the expertise to call the LLM out when it is full of b.s., are both strengths of the OctoMY™ project. Not only is there a large battle hardened source folder, lots of machine readable documentation and git history for the LLM to learn from already, I am the most stubborn, pedantic and thorough code critic ever to cross paths with an LLM.
The end result? OctoMY™ development has picked up pace by about 5x. Real changes are being implemented daily, and maybe most importantly, the work on consolidating the ambitions into a single set of documentation is underway as we speak. This will greatly help on-boarding of anyone crazy enough to even consider it, and also it will help to sharpen efforts and spend them where they are most needed.
So for this reason, I look to 2026 with hope, and even a little confidence in my heart.
Marry Christmas and a happy new year!
