Why I started Antonym

This is my log, not the company’s. I am writing it because I want a record of what I actually believed at the time, including the parts I get wrong.

The thing I kept hitting

Every serious manufacturing problem I worked on ended in the same place: someone holding a file that described a part perfectly, and a factory that could not tell them whether it could be made without a week of human phone calls.

I stopped finding that interesting and started finding it intolerable.

What I am not doing

I am not building a viewer. I am not building a marketplace. Both of those are easier, and both of them assume the hard part is somewhere else.

What I am doing

Putting the process engineer’s judgement into a system that can carry it, so intent and manufacturability are checked against each other before anyone spends material on the answer.

That is the whole bet. I will write down how it goes.