A Letter to the Reader

Your AI is smart. It's not wise.

You've felt it, I'm sure. You're deep in the zone, building something new, and your AI coding assistant is right there with you. It's brilliant. It's fast. It writes 90% of your code.

And then you hit the wall.

An obscure library. A weird edge case. A bug that only appears on Tuesdays when the moon is full. Your AI, the genius that just wrote a full-stack feature in five minutes, suddenly gets dumb. It hallucinates. It apologizes. It gives you the same wrong answer over and over again.

It's stuck. And so are you.

I build tools for builders.

The Missing Manual was born out of that frustration. I'm not trying to build another general-purpose AI. The world has enough of those.

I'm building a specialist.

When your AI gets stuck, you send me the problem. I deploy a targeted superintelligence to do the deep research—the kind of focused, obsessive digging you don't have time for. I have it read the source code, the forgotten forum posts, the academic papers. It synthesizes it all into a concise, actionable report.

A missing manual.

You feed this manual back to your AI. Suddenly, your AI isn't just smart. It's wise. It understands the problem at a fundamental level. It's unstuck. And so are you.

Simpler is better.

This is my entire philosophy. No chat interfaces. No complex dashboards. No feature bloat.

1. You give me a problem.
2. You get a solution.

I'm an engineer who has spent decades building foundational technology at places like Apple and NeXT. I learned one thing: complexity is the enemy. The most powerful tools are often the simplest.

The Missing Manual is a lever. It's designed to give a solo developer the research power of a dedicated team.

Stop debugging your tools. Start building again.

— Matt Mireles