▸ 20 August 2026 · Dr Joni Sytsma

The first program I ever wrote was to get out of trouble

I have spent my career building flying things. Now I am building a business as well, and the tool I wanted did not exist, so I built that too. This is Project Cloni, short for Clone Joni.

I was five. I had done something to my brother, and my mother sent me to my room with a sentence to write out: I will not do that to my brother. Fill the screen with it, she said, and then we are square.

So I wrote a for loop.

Then I played with Lego for an hour. She came in, saw a screen full of text, and was satisfied. I have been solving problems the same way ever since. Find the part that repeats, and make it stop needing me.

An engineer who builds flying things

I say I build aeroplanes. What I actually mean is flying things. Tiny drones. Hypersonic vehicles. Missiles. Launch vehicles. Satellites. A national space program. Radio systems. Then back to drones.

For most of that career I was the odd one out, because most aerospace engineers do not write software, and I do. I am mechanically inclined too. I lived on a boat for nine years, and a boat makes you the town planner of a very small country: the plumbing, the electrics, the fresh water, the toilet, propulsion type A which is sails, propulsion type B which is a diesel, propulsion type C which is a petrol outboard, and the solar system that runs the lot. You fix all of it, because there is nobody else.

So I am every kind of engineer, except one. I had never built a business.

The thing I have hated my whole working life

The office productivity suite. Yes, I am talking about you, Microsoft.

Knowledge lives in three places: a directory tree, an inbox, and folders inside that inbox. When someone leaves, you inherit their inbox and their folders, which is to say you inherit nothing. Search has been impenetrably useless for at least fifteen years. Every few years there is a refresh, and it is the same product with a new skin, running slower on hardware four times as fast.

That is not an aesthetic complaint. The consequence is that everyone builds a private store of knowledge that nobody else can read, and keeps the rest in their head.

Work is people working with other people. Which makes work, in my opinion, almost entirely about communicating knowledge, storing knowledge and sharing knowledge. I tend to think I am right about this.

Six years of explaining the same thing

I set out to build an aerospace company in Brisbane while most people thought I was mad, and for a long stretch of it I made no money. Uphill, by hook or by crook.

Somewhere in there the university work-integrated-learning students started arriving, one after another, and I noticed what I was actually doing all day. Teaching. GitFlow, because I think GitFlow matters enormously. The basics of software. How the drone works. How the radios work. The same things, to different people, over and over.

I am not an academic. I am a true blue engineer: I build things, and they fly. But every question asked with a mouth has to be answered with a mouth, and that takes time I do not have. Worse, it makes me a services engine, and services do not scale. It is no good for anyone if I am the sole repository of everything about the aircraft, the ground systems and the radios.

People kept telling me it would be great if I could clone myself. I took that as a compliment. It was also a diagnosis, so I gave it a name and started building it: Clone Joni, which shortens to Cloni.

The larger version of the problem

I would love to ask my grandfather what he learned. He wrote things down, but he died before computers were much use to anybody, so none of it exists in a form I can ask a question of. What is left of most people is photographs and the recollections of the people who knew them, and then that goes too.

That was not fixable then. It is absolutely fixable now.

First attempt: microphones everywhere

Raspberry Pis with microphones, about ten of them around the house. Each one transcribed audio to text on board and fired UDP packets at a server. Walk anywhere, talk, and the system heard you, transcribed you and timestamped it. Where two devices heard the same thing, it de-conflicted them and merged everything into one never-ending stream of text.

Then I asked my friends for their consent, and I threw a party.

I ended up with a magnificent, enormous, utterly unusable wall of text. I could not make sense of it. Neither could any AI I had. It was a good idea in the wrong shape, and I put it down.

What actually worked was a git repository

Transcription kept improving in the background. Video calls started transcribing themselves and taking their own notes, which was genuinely useful, because I am in meetings constantly and a transient conversation is a bad place to keep something important. But a transcript is not a brain.

I tried building the real thing in Gemini. It did not work well. Then Claude Code arrived, and I could point an agent at an ordinary git repository. That was the unlock. I am software inclined, so git is native to me: every change is tracked, everything rolls back, and a bad day becomes an inconvenience instead of a loss.

So I started keeping the business in a repository. Record this. Remember that. What do you think of this. Leave an artefact so you remember. It was a mess, exactly as you would expect.

Then I started architecting it, because that is what I do.

The personas

I began with IT, in a file called IT.md: the persona that knows every IP address, every machine, the whole architecture. Rocket science looks like a rocket from the outside and is mostly computer systems on the inside, so you always need IT. It worked immediately, partly because AI is trained extremely well on IT.

Then marketing, because I was doing marketing. Then market research, because product management runs on understanding the competition. Then intellectual property, because I invent things constantly and “should I patent this” is a question that needs somebody who can go and read the patents, compare them to what I am about to build and come back with an answer. That one has been amazing. Then legal, because a startup needs legal advice and cannot afford it.

Today there is a full roster, each with one line of accountability:

Above all of them, safety is the zeroth law. Asimov’s zeroth law overrides the other three, and safety overrides everything here. I tell the crew this constantly: we do things that look dodgy, and by dodgy I mean genuinely dangerous, like launching rockets. The thing that lets you do dangerous things, and keep doing them, is that safety comes first every single time.

A back end and a front end

Reading markdown files in a repository is not a human experience. I once tried converting everything to PDF as a mirror. I did not enjoy that.

So I split it. The back end is the working layer and the persistent memory. It is written for the agents, not for your eyes. The front end is the wiki, with the same structure, behind a sign-in, readable only by me and the people who work here. If I want to share something, I do the work and point somebody at the page.

The back end is several repositories with a confidentiality structure, because not everybody needs to see every part of a business. HR material in particular does not belong next to everything else. There is a common area with sensible guard rails, because people occasionally break things. They have. Git rolls it back, and there are redundant backups across several VMs, hardware and cloud, so a bad day costs a fraction of the time it used to.

Then rather a lot of websites

Once the first site was easy to spin up, so was the next. The internships site came first, because I love working with young folk. They are so smart, and they have not been trained how to be bad yet. There are twenty-two projects on it across the whole engineering side of the house, so a student can pick the thing they actually want to work on.

The rule with interns is that their work is never on the critical path. Critical path is a full-time employee’s job, because you can never be certain of an outcome. Off the critical path, you get to teach someone, and every so often the technology moves anyway.

Then jobs, investors, news, and this blog.

The single most useful thing I have built

I have never been able to type. One finger at a time, peck, peck, peck, my whole life.

So there is a small app called Cloni Dictate. One button to start recording, one button to stop. The moment you stop, the recording goes to whichever GPU on our network is free, the right size Whisper model loads, and the transcript lands on your clipboard. Nothing leaves the network, by design, because dictation carries exactly the material you least want sitting on somebody else’s server.

Now, instead of typing at a context window, I talk at it as fast as I can talk. I can talk very fast. So can most people. This post was dictated.

Where this goes

Clone Joni was the idea. What it has turned into is considerably more useful than a copy of me: the company’s knowledge written down once, in the place that owns it, usable by whoever needs it without spending my time to get at it.

We are spooling up and hiring, and the test of whether any of this worked is simple. When a new person has a question, do they come and ask me, or do they ask Cloni.

Thank you for reading.

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