George Shostakovych

I build the system that ships the product.

Solo founder in the Bay Area. In five weeks I took an eldercare app from a blank repo to Apple's review queue, by building the agent setup around it and rebuilding it every time it broke. Now working on tools that read financial filings.

WorkOne flagship, four tools around it, and the commit record behind them.

Rowanstead

Eldercare coordination for the family member who is far away. Web app, iOS app, agency demo, voice notes, digest, and the outreach and operations machine around it. Solo and unfunded.

1,018commits from Jul 27
5 wkblank repo to App Store review
1.0submitted to Apple, Sep 2
Next.jsPostgresExpoPlaywrightCaddyClaude CodeHermes

Build story and post-mortem

September 2026 to now

Filings reader →

A tool that reads SEC filings and credit documents so an analyst does not have to. In customer discovery.

PythonLLM extractionSEC EDGAR
2025 to now

Asymmetry screener →

Research tool for levered small-caps, built on the SEC bulk XBRL archive. Used daily by a fund.

PythonXBRLSEC EDGAR
2026

Agent harness →

The multi-agent coding and operations setup one person uses to work like a small team, and the guardrails that came from breaking it.

Claude CodeHermesTelegramlaunchdPi
September 2026

Keysreallysafe →

Local API-key vault and token spend meter for a Mac. Keys live in the Keychain, usage comes from local agent logs, and nothing ever leaves the machine.

SwiftmacOS KeychainTouch IDmenu bar
GitHub activity since the first Rowanstead commit, Jul 27 2026 snapshot
1,018contributions
–per day, average
–day streak, current
Hover a day LessMore

The systemWeek by week: how the setup started, what went wrong, and what each failure turned into.

  1. Week 1
    Jul 27

    One session, one engineer

    Claude Code in a terminal, me reviewing every diff. Next.js and Postgres on a VPS behind Caddy, an Expo app beside it. Fast at first, and every hour of output cost an hour of my attention.

  2. Week 2
    Aug 10

    The thesis dies on a call, the repo does not notice

    An agency owner told me the compliance record I was building was not her problem. I logged it and kept building on the old plan for three weeks, because every artifact in the repo pointed at the old plan. Lesson: a kill gate needs a fast path for "the premise is wrong", separate from "the numbers are bad".

  3. Week 4
    Aug 19

    Split the work by how much judgment it needs

    Tightly specified changes go to a cheaper model through a dispatcher that runs several in parallel. A second model reviews the diff before I see it. First bug found: the reviewer was rubber-stamping. Lesson: a reviewer that never rejects is not a reviewer. Log the rejection reasons and read them.

  4. Week 4
    Aug 24 to 26

    Operations from a phone

    A Telegram relay to drive sessions while out, a 07:00 morning brief, a deploy command that arms and then needs a confirm within five minutes, a backup tool that whitelists config into git and scans it for secrets, read-only guards on agents that only look. Lesson: a prompt rule is not a guardrail. Anything that must not happen gets a hook or a permission.

  5. Week 5
    Aug 28

    The bad day

    Three failures in one day. An overnight headless run froze on a macOS consent dialog nobody was there to click. Three parallel browser scouts got the LinkedIn account flagged. Two iOS builds were rejected by Apple after the build service reported them finished. Lessons: headless work stays out of protected folders; one browser session at a time; "finished" is not "accepted", confirm at the destination.

  6. Week 5
    Aug 30 to 31

    Multiple sessions on one tree

    A commander session, a shared board, numbered rounds, deploy on every even round. Peers on one worktree can move each other's branches, so the protocol is small commits on main, pathspec-only adds, and never assume a message between sessions was delivered. Built and deployed an agency demo flow over the weekend this way.

  7. Week 6
    Sep 1

    The loop closes

    A nightly retro reads the day's call log and email replies and proposes prompt and rule changes. Proposals still need my yes. Same week: a local search index over 62,000 agent messages, so past decisions are recalled at zero token cost instead of re-derived.

  8. Week 6
    Sep 2 to 3

    Ship, then stop

    Version 1.0 submitted to Apple. The next day I set the project down: the thesis was right and no buyer had both the pain and a reason to pay. The set-down is a written handoff with every scheduled job accounted for, so it can be picked up or closed without rot. The system outlived the product, which was the point.

WritingNotes on shipping alone and what it costs.

Sep 4, 2026

Three weeks on a dead thesis →

The eldercare app was killed by one call in August. I kept building until September. What the delay cost and what would have stopped it sooner.

About

I am a founder in the San Francisco Bay Area. What I am good at is not a language or a framework. It is building the system that turns an idea into a shipped product when there is one person to do it: the agents, the specs, the review gates, the deploy path, the guardrails, and the habit of writing down what broke.

The agents typed most of the code on this site's projects. I built the thing that made them useful, and the week-by-week story above is the most honest CV I have.

Before Rowanstead I built a distressed-credit screener that a fund uses daily. Now I am in customer discovery for a tool that reads filings so an analyst does not have to.

Contact

Email is best: georgeshostakovich@gmail.com. I answer investors, founders building with agents, and anyone who reads filings for a living.