Rootpilot

Last time I posted here, Rootpilot was a small floating window that sat next to your Claude Code session, remembered the project, and pushed back when you were about to build the wrong thing.

It worked. That's the annoying part.

It caught scope creep. It remembered decisions I'd forgotten making. It asked "should this exist" at moments when nobody else was going to. In the closed beta, the pushback was the part people liked most.

And it changed almost nothing about what got built.

Because I'd read the pushback, think "yeah, fair", and keep going. The advice was free. Acting on it wasn't. Rewriting the plan at 11pm, cutting the feature I'd already half-described to Claude, that cost something, and it always cost it at the exact moment I had the least willpower left.

That's the thing I got wrong, and it took a beta to see it. Over-building is not an information problem. You already know you're over-building. I knew. Knowing is not what stops you. What stops you is something that owns the plan and won't build past it.

A window on the side can't own the plan. It can only have an opinion about it.

So Rootpilot is now the cockpit.

You describe an idea. It runs real research on the demand, the competitors and the pricing, and uses what it finds to sharpen the idea into the version worth building, the gap in the market nobody has filled yet. Then it writes the spec and a plan of thin slices, each with a line stating what done means, reviews that plan before a line of code exists, and flies the Claude Code you already have through the build while you watch. Run the whole thing unattended, or have it stop at every milestone for your call.

Same opinion as before, and it will still tell you when an idea doesn't hold up. The difference is that it now holds the plan it shaped, so the shape survives contact with the build.

Two things I kept from the companion, because the beta earned them. It can still refuse to go from spec to plan when the idea hasn't earned it. And I stopped taking the agent's word for "done": every slice has to pass acceptance checks the agent never sees and can't write toward, and when something only compiles, Rootpilot says exactly that instead of claiming it runs.

The short version: I spent months building something that gives good advice, and learned that good advice is not the bottleneck. Doing the thing is.

It's Mac only, it needs Claude Code and a Max or Pro subscription, and it costs nothing beyond that. No token meter, since it drives the subscription you already pay for. Your code never leaves your machine. Closed beta, free, invites going out in batches.

rootpilot.dev if you want to see it.

Last night i posted about Rootpilot on r/ClaudeAI with the framing: AI coding tools agree with everything you say, and that's the most expensive bug in vibecoding.

Half the comments were "this is AI-written garbage." Fair enough. I delegated the writing part to my collegue Claes Laudson... ;)

Ironic, given the product is about AI being too agreeable. Lesson learned.

But the other half actually engaged. One experienced dev immediately got the core idea: "should we build it" vs "how you build it." Another described a manual workflow with adversarial prompting and separate planning sessions, basically a manual version of Rootpilot. A third asked the exact right product question: how do you balance pushback without being annoying?

That last question is the one that matters. Rootpilot is quiet by default. Every intervention has to survive four layers of checks before it reaches you (each layer got added after i almost threw my MacBook out the window from Rootpilot being a pain in the ass. So after the tweaks it looks something like this: If you're deep in execution, it stays out of the way. It only speaks up when it detects real directional drift.

One guy also said "real talk your product is a couple prompts." Turns out he's building a competing tool. Funny how that works...

Still looking for more beta testers. If you use Claude Code or Cursor daily and have ever woken up realizing you built the wrong thing, https://rootpilot.dev .

3 months ago I lost three days to a feature nobody needed.

Not because Claude wrote bad code. The code was clean. Tests passed. The component rendered exactly as described. The problem was upstream: I asked for the wrong thing, and the AI said "Great idea, let's build it."

That's it. That's the bug. Not a syntax error. Not a hallucination. Just agreement.

I've been vibecoding solo for a few months now, mostly with Claude Code and Cursor. And the pattern keeps repeating. You start a session with a loose idea. The AI picks it up enthusiastically. Two hours later you've shipped something polished that doesn't move your product forward. You only realize it the next morning when the session fog clears and you think: wait, why did I build that?

The agreement trap is subtle because it feels productive.

You're getting code. You're merging PRs. Your commit graph looks healthy. But nobody in the loop is asking "should we build this at all?" The AI won't. It's optimized to help you execute, not to challenge your direction.

And it compounds across sessions. Session 1: you make a small architectural choice nobody pushes back on. Session 3: you're building on top of it. Session 7: you realize the foundation was wrong, but there's now a week of work sitting on it.

I started keeping a list of decisions I regretted. Not code bugs. Directional mistakes. Features I built because they were easy, not because they mattered. Scope I added because the AI made it feel free. Architectural choices I made at 11pm that I wouldn't have defended to another person at 9am.

The list got long enough that I started building something about it.

That's the origin of Rootpilot. It's a floating window that sits next to your AI coding session. During planning, it pushes back on what you're about to build. During the session, it hooks into Claude Code, stays present, and flags when you're drifting from what you agreed on. Between sessions, it keeps your CLAUDE.md updated from the live conversation instead of you doing it manually.

It's not a memory tool. Memory is table stakes at this point. Rootpilot is the part that has an opinion.

I'm running a closed beta with about 15 vibecoders (indie hackers and MVP founders). If you've felt this pattern, I'd genuinely like to hear how you deal with it, whether or not Rootpilot sounds interesting. How do you catch yourself building the wrong thing when your AI partner won't?

rootpilot.dev if you want to see what I'm working on.

Quick intro. I'm Leo, Stockholm-based. Spent 3 years running a marketing agency working with some of Sweden's largest brands, then did e-commerce, then built one previous startup that didn't make it as a business.

Now building Rootpilot.

The short version: AI coding tools have collapsed the cost of writing code. The new bottleneck isn't typing speed, it's direction. You ship brilliant code for the wrong feature in an afternoon, lose half your decisions between sessions, and watch your architecture drift while the AI agrees with everything you say.

Rootpilot is a small floating window that sits next to your AI coding session (Cursor, Claude Code, Codex). Persistent project memory, opinionated about what to build, willing to push back. The co-founder you wish you had.

Where I am right now:

• Building toward closed beta

• Looking for 10 vibecoders to try it on a real project (indie hackers and MVP founders) to use Rootpilot on a real project for a few weeks

I'll post weekly updates here. If you want to follow along or join the beta, drop a comment or DM me.