Butter Bot
Micro pain-killers that do one tiny job perfectly.
2025 is the year of the butter-bot: tiny micro pain-killers that take on one task perfectly and then step out of the frame. They are the opposite of dashboards and Swiss‑army tools—built in short bursts, aimed at one stubborn friction point, and opinionated about staying small.
We ran a week of sub‑20‑minute sprints to prove the approach:
- Speedometer (speed): live km/h and knot readouts while breaking in a new outboard engine.
- Time Zone Tango (tango): instant yes/no for six cities—Paris, Pune, San Francisco, New York, Singapore, Melbourne—so meetings don’t require a spreadsheet.
- Disagreement Dial (disagree): a knob for nudging an LLM chatbot from polite to provocative, depending on how much resistance you want.
- Conversions (convert): a snap converter for the temperature, weight, and length units that come up in our own lab notes.
Each butter-bot is built from scratch, by us, to resolve a specific itch. They publish an MCP interface when it makes sense, so future butter-agents can string them together without inheriting a feature bloat problem.
Why we care
- Generative tools turned us from tool users into tool makers; the overhead of building is now measured in minutes, not months.
- One sharp solution always beats a bundle of half-baked features.
- If we can build a butter-bot faster than we can evaluate an off-the-shelf tool, we ship the butter-bot.
More butter-bots are lining up. What tiny pain would you automate first? Drop an idea and we’ll prototype a new pain-killer. Kick the tyres at btrbot.com.