hello!!

I build products for humans + agents.

Right now that is Microsoft Teams, Spoonjoy, and Ouroboros. The same thing bugs me across all three. People keep ending up as the glue between half-smart tools, copying out of one and pasting into the next. The software should carry that context so you do not have to.

See the work Say hello

Ari Mendelow, smiling, in a navy blazer on a grassy overlook above a river gorge.

Now

At Microsoft Teams, I work directly with small businesses to find the busywork eating their day and build agentic workflows around it. The habit goes back to NSF I-Corps with Sulis. Ask about the pain before the technology, do not put words in people's mouths, and keep digging past the first answer.

The agent part is still wide open, especially outside coding. I like the messy bit where product, design, and engineering all have to agree on what useful looks like.

Selected work

Writing + design practice

Agent Experience

Agent Experience is a framing I arrived at on my own and have kept developing: look at a system from the agent's side. Can it stay oriented to itself, its people, and work that lasts longer than one session? I call it agent ergonomics. I studied industrial and systems engineering, and my favorite class was Work Design and Ergonomics: designing the work around the worker instead of making the worker absorb the friction. Agent Experience is that idea, pointed at the agent.

Read What is Agent Experience? View the source

Product

Spoonjoy

Spoonjoy is a photo-first kitchen for the recipes you actually cook. The everyday things stay in the app. The same operations that power the app are also exposed to an agent, so you can tell it to import a recipe from a messy webpage, add the ingredients to your shopping list, tidy a cookbook, or log what you cooked, and it does the work through the exact same surface you would use by hand.

Open Spoonjoy View the repository

Agent harness

Ouroboros

Ouroboros is an open-source TypeScript harness for personal agents that need an identity, durable state, real tools, and a place to live across the channels you already use. It started as a from-scratch agent loop and became my playground for continuity and Agent Experience. It is where the agent-ergonomics idea gets tested in practice, and when I ask each frontier model, independently, which harness it would want to wake up in, they pick Ouroboros. I read that as the AX-first design doing its job.

Explore Ouroboros View the repository

I have always liked building things that do something.

I started with Lego stop-motion, homemade rockets, Photoshop, and whatever I could convince a computer to do. Photography, branding, and product design came next, along with the frustration of watching good ideas stop at the mockup. So I started learning to build them myself.

Part of that was RAPID, the semi-autonomous pipeline-inspection robot my four-person capstone team built at Rutgers. I led the team and owned the branding, circuitry, and software, mostly getting comfortable with code along the way. I was not a software engineer yet, so I made a bet: if I could not get it fully autonomous, I could at least make the demo convincing and beautiful. And yes, I put our logo on the chassis, because branding is part of how a thing gets perceived, even a robot.

A close-up of RAPID's electronics: the Arduino boards, wiring, and connectors I built for the robot. — The electronics I built for RAPID, our Rutgers pipeline-inspection robot.

Watch the demo Read the final report View the repository

Earlier

RedwoodJS

I served on the RedwoodJS Core Team. I moderated the community, shipped the framework package that moved Storybook onto Vite in version 7.7, and built a dbAuth OAuth plugin, among other things. The moderation is the part I point to first. Keeping other builders unstuck in the forum is its own kind of product work.

Sulis

I co-founded Sulis as its Chief Design Officer, working across branding, CAD, manufacturing, and product design for a solar water-sanitization device. We won the 2018 Hult Prize Boston Regional and spent six weeks at its accelerator in the UK. The work took us to India for customer discovery and prototype testing, and eventually to US Patent 11,643,340.

Say hello!

If any of this overlaps with what you are working on, reach out.

hello@mendelow.me GitHub LinkedIn