Paul Bakaus

Product Engineer before it was cool.

Career
2007 jQuery UI Created the interaction library for the web. Core jQuery team.
2010 Zynga Built one of the first browser game engines. Startup acquired by Zynga.
2013–2021 Google Chrome DevTools product lead. AMP & Web Stories. Founded Google for Creators.
2022–2024 Spotter EVP Product. Built AI-powered SaaS for YouTube creators at scale.
Now Independent Open source, advising, building the next thing.

"Each time, a technology shift was happening and the tools hadn't caught up. That's where I tend to end up."

Spotter Studio

AI creativity tools for the world's biggest creators

Used by MrBeast, Dude Perfect, and thousands more

Built and led the product that helped YouTube creators brainstorm, plan, and produce content. Invented novel AI interfaces beyond chat that mirror how the creative process actually works. Built a custom Flux-based thumbnail generator and solved random seeding for true LLM creativity.

Beyond-chat AI UX Flux thumbnail gen LLM random seeding Creative process modeling
Spotter Studio — AI-powered creative platform for YouTube creators
Proof Point

One person.
Five months.
Enterprise quality.

2M lines of code
5–10 person agency replaced

Built Climate Portal for 3Degrees, a Fortune 500 enterprise app. Full-stack Next.js, Supabase, Stripe. Advanced agentic workflows with Claude and MCP. Minimal code debt. A bet with their CTO that one person with AI can outperform a team.

Climate Portal — 3Degrees enterprise application
Extract & Share

Every workflow has friction that most people accept and some people fix. While building enterprise apps and exploring new ideas, I keep extracting the tools that make me faster and sharing them. These are the first few drops.

Impeccable

AI coding tools have no design sense. Impeccable gives them one. A skills system for Claude Code and Cursor that teaches real design expertise.

5k+ GitHub stars 2k+ visitors/hour

agent-reviews

Token-efficient, automated GitHub review workflows and bug fixing. Manages the full PR lifecycle from review to resolution.

Open Source

burn-after-login

Solves authentication for AI browser automation. Analyzes your auth system, creates dev-only shortcuts, then self-destructs.

Open Source
Thesis
01

Beyond the chat box

We're stuck in a world where AI means typing into a chat window. The real opportunity is AI that's richer, more visual, more creative. Generative interfaces that shape themselves to the moment, the person, the task.

02

AI for the common people, not just developers

The most impactful AI products haven't been built yet, because they're for people the industry isn't paying attention to.

03

Curation in the age of slop

AI can generate anything. That's the problem. We understand curation in the physical world: museum curators, sommeliers, the friend who makes the perfect mixtape. It's time to bring it back to the web.

04

The rise of the Super IC

The future belongs to small teams of unspecialized but obsessed builders with great taste, product sense, and engineering skill rolled into one. Full stack human.

Ideas I'm Exploring

Last Mile

AI lab for the common people. Making AI work for everyone, not just developers.

Reimagine the interface
Project Clair
Always-on visual next-step prediction for any creative app
Parallel Worlds
Social media where you follow yourself in parallel dimensions
Reality Shift
Camera app capturing past, present, and future of any place
AI for everyone
Future Modeler
Map and explore potential futures for yourself and loved ones
Auto Back-Catalog
Agent that auto-optimizes YouTube creators' back catalogs
Enterprise Automation Extractor
Trace software usage 24/7, auto-extract common workflows
Signal from noise
1hr YouTube
Daily curated content by human experts, distributed at scale by AI
Company Activity Predictor
Market intelligence extracted from job posting noise
Dependabot on Steroids
Context-aware dependency updates from changelog noise
Visual PRs
Clarity from code changes via auto-generated diagrams

Let me show you.