Yoo fellow coders and late-night builders! Marc here, and today’s diary is a little different 😜
No new repo, no sneaky tool, no desktop pet this time. This one’s personal: I joined Horizon-Ai as CTO. Yeah. The guy who keeps saying “if nobody builds it, I’ll build it myself” just said yes to building it with a team. Plot twist of the year.
A horizon, a star, a new chapter:
That little mark — a horizon line, a rising dot, and a star breaking through — is Horizon-Ai. And somehow I'm the CTO now.
Let me back up. For the longest time I was the classic lone-wolf rogue dev — Resonix-AG, RE CODE, MarcStar, Pawly, DiscorverX, all me, all solo, all “I’m too lazy to explain my code to anyone so I’ll just do everything myself.” And honestly? I loved it. Building alone at 2 AM is my comfort zone.
But here’s the thing nobody tells you about shipping a pile of projects: people start noticing. The Horizon-Ai folks reached out, we got to talking, and I realized our brains were weirdly in tune — same obsession with AI that actually helps instead of hallucinating, same allergy to bloat, same “ship it and iterate” energy. One conversation turned into “wait, do you wanna run engineering for us?” And after staring at my ceiling for a bit, I went: why not. Age never stopped me from speaking at a conference or building a browser, so it sure isn’t gonna stop me from being a CTO.
So what’s the move now? My job, simply put, is to own the tech and the direction of how we build. Architecture, the engineering culture, deciding what we make and how — and making sure every product we ship has that reliable, no-nonsense, actually works feeling I’m obsessed with. The same standard I held my solo repos to, just pointed at something bigger than one person.
I’m not gonna pretend I have it all figured out. Going from “I am the entire team” to “I lead a team” is a real shift — suddenly my messy 2 AM commits affect other people, and “I’ll just rewrite it” isn’t always the answer. But that’s exactly why I’m hyped. I get to keep the rogue-dev instincts and finally aim them at problems too big to solo.
Real talk: I built a bunch of stuff alone to prove I could. Joining Horizon-Ai is me betting that the next interesting thing isn’t another solo repo — it’s what happens when a few people who actually vibe build toward the same horizon. (Yeah, I went there. The logo made me do it.)
To everyone who starred my repos, yelled at me in my issues tab, or just followed along the chaos — thank you. This is the next chapter, and I’m bringing the same energy, just with backup now.
Alright, enough feelings for one diary 😜. Time to go architect something. Catch you next time — from a slightly bigger desk.
Horizon-Ai: https://www.horizon-startup.com — come see what we’re building.