I've spent 30 years building cloud-native applications and production infrastructure. The same pattern repeats at every startup — and AI has made it worse, not better.

In 2026, engineers can scaffold auth, email, and search in a day with AI tools. The code exists fast. But it's tightly coupled to one provider, has no observability, no migration path, and no production hardening. When the provider raises prices, can't scale, or doesn't meet compliance — that's a quarter-long rewrite. AI accelerated the build. It also accelerated the lock-in.

I call this the NFR Tax — the invisible cost that kills engineering velocity and creates architectural debt that compounds with every round of funding.

ScullyOS is the fix. A production-grade Service OS that provisions a complete platform for your startup: provider-agnostic microservices (identity, authorization, backoffice, email, search, feature flags), a full operating layer (OpenTelemetry, GitOps, MCP per service), and a built-in agentic core — your system ships with a working agent that can operate all services from day zero.

OnTheBits puts that platform — and a senior CTO — in the hands of founders who need engineering power without an engineering payroll.