It started with a what if.
Satyajit — stories from building

Hey, I'm Satyajit. I build apps, and I also spend my weekends gaming, unboxing tech, and making things with my 3D printer. A lot of these projects began with a question I couldn't leave alone. Could an agent have its own phone? Could moving a laptop lid do something useful? I wanted to show you the beginnings, as well as what those ideas became.

OpenAlly started because I was bored of the same personal-assistant concept. I wanted to build for someone who has a business to run and a life outside it. Someone who could talk to agents about both.

A shop might need to check stock, find an order, or prepare an invoice. The same person has plans, files, and everyday things to keep track of. That was the starting point: business and life, in the same place.

Building that meant giving agents access to the things the conversation was about. A stock question needs the catalogue. An invoice needs an order and customer details. The records have to be there when you come back.

That is how I think about OpenAlly now. You choose an agent and the tools it can use. It works with records that you can also open yourself. It belongs on a phone, and on a Mac, because the work needs to continue across both.

There were less visible problems too. In one of our local-model tests, the descriptions of fifteen tools used up most of the space the model had to read our request. The full request was more than twice what that build could accept.

We removed the tools, and the model answered. That helped locate the problem, but an agent without tools couldn't do the work. We had to choose relevant tools more carefully, shorten what we sent, and leave room for an answer. That's a part of building this that a screenshot won't show you.

Aster began with a much more literal idea. I wanted to give my AI agent its own phone.

You could take a spare Android, keep it connected, and let the agent use that device. I built Aster for the OpenClaw era around that idea. It could see the screen, work through apps, and use the phone's capabilities.

The connection can run from the Android app itself, through MCP and app-to-app IPC. The permissions and tool-call history are visible on the device. Giving an agent a phone also means deciding what it can reach, and being able to stop it.

Aster is open source. You can read how that connection works, or build on it.

UnfoldMyMac started with an animation I saw on a folding phone. I wanted to try it on my MacBook, so I started playing with the sensors.

The first experiment was blur. Lower the lid, and the desktop blurs. Lift it, and it clears. Stop halfway, and the effect stops with you.

Then I added curtains. Then more effects. I only meant to make one.

Once the rendering was there, I wanted to try live wallpapers with real data behind them. A GitHub profile could become a little city. Coding activity could keep a factory busy. That grew into UnfoldMyMac's wallpaper engine, with separate designs and data sources so I could keep adding ideas.

I'd been making things for small screens long before these apps. In eighth standard, I was building WAP apps and mobile-game portals with XHTML and PHP. Later came certificate tools for colleges, Android apps, and wireless IoT systems with companion apps.

During COVID, I built ZyadaShop to help merchants get their businesses online in a few taps. Small merchants, bigger merchants; I wanted them to be able to manage the business from a phone.

It grew into a mobile-first commerce platform, with a catalogue, inventory, orders, payments, and its own app-generation workflow. We shipped more than five hundred features. Generating an Android APK took about fifteen seconds. Publishing it on Google Play was a separate process.

ZyadaShop won a Google Play Hidden Gems award in twenty twenty-two. It was later acquired by Mosambee. I don't own it now.

At Mosambee, I helped teams build POS and merchant applications, along with the services behind them. Those applications serve lakhs of merchants. The work included the microservices and distributed systems behind them.

Away from the apps, I game, unbox tech, and print miniatures and enclosures for consumer gadgets. My printer is a Bambu Lab H2C. I share the gaming, unboxings, and builds on GamesPatch.

I also run dreamy.loopz, where I'm building an automated AI platform around peaceful moments. Those are my videos: rainy roads, a chai stop, a quiet evening.

I'm from a small town in Odisha, and I'm working in Mumbai now. If you're around, we can sit down for a coffee. I'd like to hear what you're trying to build.

Thanks for spending a few minutes with me. If one of these experiments gave you an idea, I'd love to hear it. See you around.