Bit, and Baum.
Bit for software. Baum, German for tree, for the shape: many branches from one trunk. The trunk is what lets a small group ship like a large one — and what lets the next person start in the middle rather than at the beginning.
What bitbaum is
A product studio, not a consultancy and not a single-product company. It ships AI-native products for real problems — an economic agent, an operating system for AI fleets, governance you can recount, tools for a non-profit, a clinic, a housing organisation — and each is built from the same shared infrastructure, so the next one is cheaper than the last. 15 of them run today — in beta, every one.
Why the stack is what it is
Three of the products are less products for a customer than the conditions for working together. OrangeCat is how value reaches whoever did the work, without a bank deciding who qualifies. Loki is how work is dispatched to a fleet of AI agents and people, and verified before it ships. Solon is how rules are decided and recounted, by signature rather than by trust. Building them was the answer to a plain question: what has to exist before more than one person can build here and be treated fairly?
How the work gets done
The trunk. 9 open-source packages carry the parts every product needs: which AI model to call and what to do when it fails, email, forms filled from prose, rate limits, lists, threads, design tokens, sites as data. Loki runs a fleet of AI agents that build, verify and deploy every product here — including Loki. The human job is judgment: what to build, what is good enough, what is true.
What is true
Nothing on this site is typed by hand. The list of products comes from the register that provisioning reads; the pictures are screenshots a machine takes on every build; the adopter lists come from real manifests; the counts come from GitHub, npm and the register. There are no clients on this site because there are none: the pilots run for real organisations as favours, offered first, and say so.
Open by construction
Every product and package the studio publishes is MIT: the 9 shared packages, the infrastructure, and the three products the rest is built on. OrangeCat and Loki spent three months under an All-Rights-Reserved notice written for a company that was never incorporated; they were relicensed back to MIT on 2026-09-18, and the page said so while it was true. Work built for someone else stays theirs. Contributor terms live in one place, bitbaum/.github: sign off your commits and a sweep merges anything green. Every repository’s origin is stamped nightly through OpenTimestamps and archived by Software Heritage, anchored in Bitcoin since block 966918, so precedence is arithmetic rather than a claim.
What originators are owed, and what is actually paid
A versioned rule in Solon says a tenth of a product’s net revenue belongs to the originators of the code it is built from, split equally, with who-originated-what read from the origin register rather than typed into the policy. The rule computes that split deterministically today. Nothing has been paid, and nothing can be yet: there is no revenue, no payout ledger, and the economic layer that moves money does not read the rule. It is a commitment made before it costs anything — which is the only time a commitment like that is cheap to make, and the reason it is written down where it can be checked.
Numbers, in the open
Stars, forks, downloads, paying clients and what has been paid to originators are read nightly from sources that are not us and published as they are — most of them zero today. The readings, and the writing that keeps score in public.
Work with the studio
Fractional CTO and contract engineering, Zürich. Rates, scope and the waitlist are on the hire page. The code is on GitHub.